Original subtitles

When a murder is left unsolved...

No weapons, no eyewitnesses, no forensic evidence at all.

There was nothing.

..And a killer is on the loose... These people are still out there.

Who's going to be next?

..Britain's cold case detectives will never give up.

The best way to solve a cold case is to keep it warm.

No matter how long it takes... This case dominated my life.

..They'll investigate every angle and uncover every clue...

Searching through thousands of people.

They think they've got away with it, they haven't.

..Until the killer is caught at last.

We all leave a trace. We'd finally identified that golden nugget.

Bingo! We've got her.

In 2003, a bright young teenage schoolgirl suddenly went

missing without a trace. It was mid-October,

it was sort of an afternoon in the office and the phone went,

and my boss said, "there's this case in warrington.

"I'd like you to be part of that team." So I went and joined that

team. My job was to look at some of the enquiry side and within

a couple of weeks really, we sort of reported that this was a big case.

The missing girl was 17-year-old shafilea Ahmed,

whose disappearance had been reported by a concerned teacher.

Dci geraint Jones, who'd spent 30 years as a murder detective,

had a hunch something wasn't right.

He immediately built an experienced team of investigators,

including missing persons expert, di Dave Edgar.

Obviously, this was... it was a missing from home investigation.

And as such, we treated it that way. So we're looking for,

is there a genuine reason why she'd gone missing?

Has she gone missing before? We're looking for her friends,

associates, previous relationships, bank account, any movement on it?

Atm machines, any movement on them?

Her phone. Cell site analysis on the phone.

Itemised billing on the phone.

All these things and they're all looked into meticulously.

There was no activity on her bank account.

She didn't have a mobile telephone, which was odd.

She was happy in work, she'd only just gone back to college to restart her a-levels.

Everything was looking good for shafilea.

Shafilea's parents' account was she must have gone off with a boy, or whatever.

Desperate to understand more about shafilea, dci Jones tracked down the

people who knew her best, including family friend shahin munir.

We have quite a tight-knit community

there and the Ahmed family was part of that community.

Shafilea's younger sister, mehvish, I knew when we were younger,

when we used to go to the mosque together.

And I remember shafilea being this really beautiful girl.

From what I know of her, I know she grew up to be very bubbly, very fun,

and really had a lot of energy and a lot of life aspirations about her.

One of my main early goals were gain more publicity

and seek the help of the public to see if we could find shafilea.

If she's alive somewhere, someone will have seen her, let's get in touch and help us out.

Knowing he had to act quickly, geraint launched a public

appeal that grabbed the media's attention from day one.

When I walked into this conference room in warrington,

it was full, absolutely full of journalists, media, cameras,

and the scale of interest really shocked me. There was

something about this case that brought the media out immediately

and it never stopped from there. Reporting for the guardian in 2003,

journalist Helen Carter followed every step of the case.

She'd literally just disappeared into thin air

and it was one of those stories

where you had a lot of questions about what was going on

and what could possible have happened to her.

Aware he had to get the small Muslim community

in warrington on board,

geraint asked the schoolgirl's family to help with the appeal.

When they initially tried to have some

sort of help from the family, they said no straight away.

They said any publicity would bring shame on that family

and they wanted nothing to do with any appeal.

When you look at shafilea's case, you do scratch your head

a little bit and certainly this is talking 2003 in cheshire,

where our sort of knowledge of these cultural issues, quite low.

Geraint needed a deeper understanding of the Pakistani

community, so contacted renowned criminologist professor Aisha Gill,

a specialist who worked with south Asian communities.

What I was really interested in was to explore the family

dynamics within this family.

They had interviewed her family, her friends, the parents,

and we'd hardly got any information.

They really hit a number of brick walls.

I think especially when you have a tight-knit community, it's

very easy for people to see things and then, you know, gossip about it.

Far from being the happy teenager her family suggested,

geraint soon realised that the 17-year-old's parents had

a reputation within the close-knit Muslim community.

They would control what she was wearing, the clothes

she wore to college, what she would wear outside of the home.

You would have members of the community calling the parents

to say, "I've just seen shafilea wearing this."

When she was working, you know,

the money she was earning would have to be given to the family.

Shafilea wanted to fit in,

she wanted to have friends, she wanted to be outgoing,

but this didn't quite sit right with her family

and how they expected her to behave, as a young Muslim woman.

The control shafilea's parents have, not only on their children,

but also the wider family and the community

is astonishing. They want to control everything their children do,

and have their child act in the way that they want them to act.

Geraint's team also uncovered that shafilea had

a history of running away.

There was an instance where her siblings covered for her

and helped her to escape.

And I know that her friends at school were trying to help her

as well and I think this was a cycle where shafilea did want to escape.

So, shafilea could have run away from home to escape the parents.

It was a possibility. Got to be open-minded

and work your way through all the various lines of inquiry.

As geraint dug deeper, her motives for escaping

became more obvious.

There was stuff coming out from her former school to say there was

talk of forced marriage and in fact, shafilea ran away from home

to hide away from that forced marriage and pressure.

With no sightings of the young girl, geraint and his team were at a loss.

Then, they discovered there'd been a recent family trip to Pakistan,

which they suspected was also linked to an arranged marriage.

Events are a bit unclear, but what we do know is whilst there,

she drank a caustic substance.

And that really damaged her oesophagus.

When she returned to the UK,

in that summer, she was really, really ill.

In fact, she was so ill, when she got off the plane,

she was taken straight to warrington hospital,

and she had to have surgery to treat this oesophageal scarring,

cos she was in a serious state.

It was totally accidental and that's what she told the doctors here

in the hospital when she came back as well.

Forgive me, but how do you drink a bottle of bleach, accidentally?

It was just... she'd mistakenly taken it as a mouthwash.

All lines of inquiry were increasingly pointing to the

fact that shafilea was a runaway,

but geraint knew that if the schoolgirl was to stay alive,

she'd need to seek medical help and soon.

There'd been an appeal already within the medical journals

to say, "here's shafilea, she's got this medical condition,

"if anyone presents to any sort of medical areas, can you let us know?"

Within days, he finally got the breakthrough he'd hoped for.

It found its way to this pharmacy in Glasgow and they got in touch

to say, "we think we've seen this girl and here's the cctv footage."

We were hopeful this girl could now be shafilea.

In 2003, shafilea Ahmed,

a 17-year-old girl from a conservative Muslim family,

had disappeared, despite a recent suspected suicide attempt,

leaving her with life-threatening injuries.

Leading the investigation, dci geraint Jones had received cctv

from a chemist in Glasgow that he hoped might be her first sighting.

I made the decision to have

the parents, iftikhar and farzana, view the video,

and they indicated to the family

liaison officers that it was shafilea.

They were pretty confident in that.

And basically were saying, "is that it now? Do we...?

"Is that the case closed?"

But for dci Jones, something didn't add up.

But it didn't look right, so they also showed the video

to her school teacher who had reported her missing,

and she said it wasn't her.

And it wasn't her, it was a Turkish girl who'd gone into this pharmacy

for the morning after pill, and it wasn't shafilea.

Whilst we were still obviously working our way through

lots of other lines of inquiry as well,

that was very frustrating.

With time running out to find shafilea alive,

geraint turned to the media once more.

We engaged with shobna gulati,

who had been sunita in coronation street,

she was in a play in Manchester at the time,

and she agreed to come on the press conference with us.

Using the well known Asian actress to read out secret poems

shafilea had written and hidden away,

geraint hoped to break the Muslim community's wall of silence.

My strategy there was, use shobna gulati as a different approach.

She read out shafilea's poems on the television,

which was pretty emotional for those that were close to the case.

They are quite hard hitting poems. "Desire to live is burning,

"my stomach is turning

"but they all think it's about honour..."

The one real hard hitting poem was called happy families.

And the last sentence is, "we are not a happy family."

In a poem called trapped, shafilea writes,

"I have a burden on my chest and know it won't go away

"the guilt, the pain."

It's clear that this girl is having difficulties keeping her

family happy and wanting to live

a westernised lifestyle in warrington.

It really brought home the suffering and what this young woman was

going through. It was incredibly moving.

As geraint got more information from the community about shafilea's

home life, he became increasingly concerned for her safety.

When I was friends with mehvish, she would talk about shafilea

and what she had gone through

and there was a lot of physical and emotional abuse at home.

She described to me that there would be

this chair that shafilea would sit on in the kitchen and

every family member would sit and watch as shafilea would be beaten.

And this would happen in front of all of the kids.

With no sightings, but evidence of domestic violence,

an arranged marriage and a suspected suicide attempt,

police were now working on a theory that she could have been

taken to Pakistan against her will. With time running out,

geraint took the big decision to bug the family home.

You go through a process to get intrusive surveillance,

to basically put listening devices into the house,

to hear what they've got to say for evidence and intelligence

around what's happened to shafilea.

There was sufficient case for the surveillance commissioners

to authorise.

It's rarely done, but on this occasion, that's what we did.

What geraint heard in the parents' native punjabi came as a shock.

I was never expecting this couple, who presented as an ordinary

warrington couple to be so sophisticated,

in terms of understanding police techniques.

I thought we'd put the listening devices in,

we'd hear something that would really help us find her

and contrary to that, they were extremely careful.

In fact, they were warning the children not to talk about it

cos the police would be listening.

They would have been one step ahead when it came to the investigation

of these types of cases. Back then, forced marriage was still

very much misunderstood, but police were starting to have cases

and therefore, I think the parents will have known this

and they would have known that the police were interested in them.

Now geraint knew the parents were definitely hiding something,

he brought them in for questioning.

There was evidence of them controlling her

and taking her away, so we arrested them both for kidnapping.

We brought in a criminologist for the investigation to

sort of assist us with elements that would help open them up.

I was given access to all the interviews. I was tasked with

analysing the cultural aspects

and the family dynamics within the Ahmed family.

They gave the impression that everything was fine,

that they encouraged their daughters to make their own decisions.

Farzana required an interpreter throughout,

which sort of doubles the length of time.

You know, they seemed to be a very strong pair.

Now, you try and work one against the other and try

and lead your investigation through that way as well.

Well, is she a victim, herself?

Or has he got something to say?

There was nothing of, shall we say, crucial evidence.

We suspected they knew more, but you can only take it so far.

After 36 hours in police custody,

the detectives were forced to release shafilea's parents,

iftikhar and farzana.

With no witnesses, or any forensic evidence,

their missing persons case hit a dead end.

We just couldn't find any trace of shafilea.

Frustrating, yes, but... the interviews were conducted properly.

Then, on the 4th of February 2004,

nearly five months after the schoolgirl disappeared,

a news story from the lake district caught geraint Jones' interest.

I distinctly remember that morning, I was driving to warrington police

station, had the local news on every day, that was my normal behaviour,

and I heard on the radio that up in cumbria,

there's been a body found and they don't know who it is,

all the circumstances of it are a bit unclear.

The body, found after a flood in the river Kent near sedgewick,

over 70 miles from warrington,

was so decomposed, positive identification was impossible.

But suspecting it might be shafilea, geraint asked the family

liaison officer to inform her parents.

Her father's reaction was completely unexpected.

He was showing interest and the flo sort of said,

"he's asking questions, he's interested about it."

This was the first time the parents had engaged with the investigation.

It's really interesting that the parents show much more

reaction to the body being discovered in cumbria.

This shows that they're starting to get worried.

This could be the body of shafilea. To reignite the investigation,

dci Jones needed to be sure the body was shafilea's.

When we look at iftikhar's original statements,

describing what shafilea was wearing when she went missing,

there was quite a lot of matching to what the body in cumbria had.

So everything was starting to fit.

I'm starting to think, "this girl in cumbria could now be shafilea."

Some calls are made and the initial response is,

"well, she won't be your girl because this is a white girl.

"The pathologist says it's a white girl."

It was looking like yet another blow for the detectives,

until a chance encounter finally changed their luck.

So, we're getting nowhere really and then, by coincidence,

a colleague was at a postmortem over a different case

and the pathologist just happened to be Alison armour,

who had done the postmortem up in cumbria, and they got talking and

she said, "I didn't say she wasn't Asian, I said she wasn't black."

She can't rule out if she might be an Asian girl.

So then, we raised the inquiry,

to look further into the body in cumbria.

It was the break geraint and Dave had been waiting for.

They raced to cumbria to establish how the body had got there

and what evidence they could salvage.

We were looking for debris that was in the river,

we were looking for debris that had come off the...

Possibly off the body.

The officers were there for weeks and weeks.

A lot of the body was still there.

Had the body been in the river, it would

not have found its way that intact.

So it was clear that this body had been put there.

Girls just don't drop down dead on a river bank.

She obviously hadn't drowned.

But the body was... You know, at the side.

And the timescales coincide with how long shafilea had been missing,

from September.

There were several difficulties that we had,

establishing a cause of death.

Expert opinion was that this body has been a result of some

sort of asphyxiation.

By the 23rd of February 2004,

the DNA results came back, confirming that the skeletal

remains did indeed belong to 17-year-old shafilea Ahmed.

I spent a lot of time with cheshire police at that time

and I'll never forget that...

..What was a carcass,

an unrecognisable body found in cumbria.

And it was... It was really hard.

And that there was no dignity,

that the body had been found by a river bank.

It was very emotional for all of

us. I remember one of the team I'd been on this

case from the beginning with me, gave me a hug and said,

"we've found her now, we're going to get them."

At that point, with an unidentified body at the side of the river,

with no apparent cause of death, to us now knowing that that

body in cumbria is shafilea - the mind-set changes.

I remember saying it like yesterday,

is that this is now a murder investigation.

The pressure was now on to smoke out shafilea's killer.

First, geraint and Dave had to establish why the schoolgirl's

asphyxiated body had ended up over 70 miles away

from her home town of warrington.

From my police experience, this was a classic deposition site.

It was well away from the family home

and research has shown that if the victim's been murdered

by someone that knows them,

they'll take the body as physically far away from...

..As they can.

We obviously suspected she'd been murdered

and the body had been dumped there.

My view was that someone's killed her locally in warrington

and decided to get rid of her up in cumbria.

She didn't end up further in into the lake district,

she ended up in Sedgwick,

probably cos on that Thursday night, it was busy.

There'd been the torch lighting procession, a very busy event,

and the traffic will have been backing up.

My hypothesis is that the killer, with the body in the car,

has come up into that traffic and had to take a turn off

and then the first lay-by is the first opportunity, really,

along that road where you could actually get rid of a body.

With shafilea's case now officially murder,

geraint held another press conference,

hoping to persuade someone to come forward and identify the killer.

We've always been suspicious of the circumstances.

Shafilea's murder sparked national interest

as a possible so-called honour killing, with the press

linking her desire to be western with bringing shame on the family.

The honour killing was the elephant in the room on this story.

People were asking the police before the press conference

about honour killing.

This term "honour killing" is not a term that I've used

here in this enquiry.

I don't wish to comment about terminology that I haven't used.

But nothing could prepare the detective

and the assembled press for what happened next.

That was a big moment for us all, really.

But what it did do was bring even more scrutiny,

pressure, public interest.

We haven't invited the parents to take part today, no.

The parents are very private

and we're respecting their emotions at this time.

I just remember that geraint Jones, he was talking,

he was mid-flow, when in burst shafilea Ahmed's parents.

The grim discovery of a body in the lake district was the breakthrough

dci Jones needed in the case of missing teenager shafilea Ahmed.

But he was left stunned when after months of refusing to engage

with police, shafilea's parents stormed his police press conference.

I was really surprised to find iftikhar and farzana

crying in front of the cameras, accusing us

and their solicitor basically telling us that we're racist.

That enquiry should be conducted with transparency,

rather than being based upon any form of ethnic stereotyping.

It was just the most uncomfortable...

I saw his face, geraint Jones' face, just drained of colour.

It was the police's press conference, it was their moment,

yet they burst in in this most dramatic way

to kind of put all the attention back on them.

Iftikhar and farzana Ahmed have lost a beautiful

and irreplaceable daughter.

The last thing I wanted to do was be caught on live television

in some sort of discussion with the suspects.

So I escaped through the fire exit and drove to warrington

police station and watched the events on television.

They went from a passive family,

iftikhar and farzana not wanting anything to do at all,

to an aggressive solicitor-led approach, in the media,

challenging what we were doing.

The Asian press and the local community

were behind the parents.

They were saying, look, the police are not sympathetic,

they are racist.

Within no time, shafilea's parents began their own press campaign,

continuing to paint themselves as the victims.

..Suggesting that you Muslim people do these things.

Do what?

Would we kill our own daughter?

And would you? Never.

As iftikhar and farzana ramped up their accusations

against the police, geraint Jones and his team stepped up

their investigation into the parents,

who were now their prime suspects.

You follow the evidence wherever you go

and the evidence is pointing at events at that house.

Iftikhar is a busy taxi driver, so part of the investigation was,

let's have a look at his meter but he'd had that deleted,

so we didn't have evidence there.

It's not something you would do as a taxi driver.

Crucially, both geraint and Dave uncovered that

iftikhar had a reputation amongst other taxi drivers in the area.

I had some acquaintances who were taxi drivers

and it's fair to say that iftikhar was not a popular individual.

Lots of people had their suspicions that he'd been involved.

There's people that had come forward and recalled being in a taxi

with him when he was rude or aggressive.

It's clear that he had a temper.

One taxi driver recalls a conversation with iftikhar,

well before shafilea was killed, and in that conversation,

iftikhar actually said to him, "if I was ever to kill someone,

"I would throw them in the lake district,

"where they would never be found."

It was shocking but that's the mind-set that iftikhar had then.

In April 2004, two months after the schoolgirl's body had been found,

warrington came to a standstill when shafilea's funeral was held.

Everybody was just devastated.

The family was devastated.

And I guess in the back of your mind, you're thinking,

but they could they have done that?

But it's something you really don't want to believe is true.

Determined not to let the case go cold,

dci Jones put his evidence to the crown prosecution service

for permission to charge mr and mrs Ahmed with murder.

The barrister's advice to the cps at that point was it's not quite

reaching the threshold to have the realistic prospect of conviction.

So we... We didn't have enough.

So we had to go and try and find some more evidence

and we didn't get any more evidence.

It isn't very nice to see people you suspect of murder

just walking down the street, enjoying their lives.

I think he thought he was untouchable.

Should have let us off months ago.

And we shouldn't have actually been on bail in the first place.

So it's just proven the point that we've been telling

the truth from day one.

With the parents still on the loose and no concrete proof,

the investigation was left dead in its tracks once again.

We just didn't have that final piece of crucial evidence

to convince the cps.

The case was not getting anywhere, really.

Over four years after the discovery of shafilea's remains,

a newly promoted detective superintendent geraint Jones

gave evidence at an inquest into her death -

determined to prove his suspicion that iftikhar and farzana

had murdered the schoolgirl.

The coroner comes to the verdict that it's an unlawful killing.

That it's a vile murder and that things going on in shafilea's

home life are probably a big factor in her murder -

full stop.

But the parents weren't happy with the inquest's result.

We sat through days of evidence in cumbria and then her parents,

they wouldn't accept the unlawful killing verdict.

They absolutely wouldn't accept it and they actually tried to go

to court to appeal it and they were unsuccessful

in their bid to get it overturned.

Hoping the verdict may finally persuade the cps

to pursue the parents for murder,

dci geraint Jones was dogged in keeping the case alive.

I'd make a bit of an appeal again and there's certain journalists

that followed it and would put little things out

but we didn't get anywhere further.

But one of the last sentences that the qc put on the brief was,

the key moment for any of this is if you get a new witness,

particular someone from within the family, that can, you know,

say what's happened, then you've got a case.

Despite five years of intense investigation,

the family's wall of silence had never cracked.

It looked like the end of the road for geraint Jones and David Edgar.

This was a very, very difficult case and every...

..Every Avenue that we turned down, we were getting shut off, basically.

So we were, erm...

..Very frustrated - but determined to carry on

because we suspected that she'd been killed in the family home.

It's a sense of bringing the offenders to justice.

Then, in the summer of 2010, two years after the inquest

and seven years after shafilea disappeared,

something happened at the Ahmed house

that finally blew the case wide open.

Doorbell rings

alesha was home from university and that evening,

she had opened the door to three armed robbers.

You know, they had... They had masks on.

And the family had been tied up, apart from alesha.

They all had, I believe, cable ties

and they had a hammer, a crowbar and a gun.

And they were all threatened to be quiet and alesha then had taken

them upstairs, I guess to where the money and the jewellery was.

When mr and mrs Ahmed reported the robbery,

they told officers their own daughter alesha had masterminded it.

22-year-old alesha was arrested but claimed

she was only taking back money her parents had stolen from her.

The family were taking money from her account,

which again, I'm guessing that she was probably going

the same way as shafilea was.

That she was finding her feet and mixing with the world

and she'd gone off to university

and perhaps they weren't satisfied with how she was behaving.

Geraint Jones, who'd led the investigation into shafilea's

murder from day one, was on holiday.

Phone rings

I get a phone call saying, "she's talking",

that's the way I remember him saying it - "she's talking."

So I knew what he meant, really.

What I didn't really know is which sibling.

So he said alesha's been arrested, she's saying

I really need to speak to you about this stuff that's gone on

and about my sister's murder and i'm worried about them now doing

stuff to my little sister that is a repeat

of what was happening to shafilea.

Obviously my feeling, what happened, what I was told,

my word was "bingo, we've got them."

I just knew that that was the final piece that we were just waiting for.

What alesha told geraint and his team as her parents had suffocated

her sister shafilea using a plastic bag

in front of her siblings.

She had basically told us what we suspected all along -

that she'd been killed in the family home

and the circumstances were very, very unpleasant.

With geraint promoted to another department,

cheshire police brought in a new senior investigating officer

to push the case through.

But geraint retained an advisory role

in the case that had haunted him for seven years.

This... probably the hardest time for me of the whole case is now,

because I've controlled this and I really didn't like it

because I had so much attachment to this case.

But that made it probably more and more

sensible to have someone new come in.

Looking back, that was the right decision.

In September 2011, after eight years of struggling to prove

shafilea's parents were responsible for her death,

armed with alesha's devastating statement,

police finally charged iftikhar and farzana

with their daughter's murder.

In may 2012, nearly two years after the robbery,

her parents were put on trial at Chester crown court.

The disturbing details of alesha Ahmed's testimony

were shocking beyond belief.

From behind a screen, alesha described the moment her parents

used a plastic bag to suffocate shafilea, saying...

I was in court throughout the trial

and I remember alesha had heard her mother say

"etay khatam kar",

meaning "finish it here".

And shafilea lost her struggle for life on that settee

on the night of 11th September 2003.

Mr Ahmed, did you murder your daughter?

It was powerful and emotional testimony

but the fact remained that alesha had masterminded an armed robbery

against the very people she was accusing of murder.

Alesha's evidence - dramatic.

So the defence's push is that she's just lying

and because she set up a robbery at the house,

obviously there are some questions about her credibility.

The case against iftikhar and farzana Ahmed was on a knife edge.

People are just hanging on to every word, hanging on to every word.

Determined not to give up,

geraint and his team made a dramatic last-minute discovery

of new evidence that would prove to be pivotal.

During the trial, we made contact with shahin

stand shahin arts talking about her friendship with mevish,

shafilea's other sister, and she's kept copies of material

that actually corroborates the alesha account.

I went through a lot of emotions and it was very difficult.

It was four years that I knew and I kept hold of these letters.

I didn't tell anybody. You know, nobody knew.

Too petrified to go to the authorities,

shahin had kept her dark secret locked away for years.

Until now.

The case against iftikhar and farzana Ahmed for murdering

their eldest daughter shafilea was in danger of collapsing due to the

credibility of the prosecution's star witness,

shafilea's sister, alesha.

Family friend shahin munir approached geraint Jones' team

about some explosive new evidence she'd kept hidden since 2005 -

two years after shafilea had been killed.

Shafilea's younger sister mevish, I knew when we were younger,

when we used to go to the mosque together.

As me and mevish were speaking more and more,

it became very clear to me that she was not happy at home,

that she was suffering a lot,

so we had to be very careful how we communicated.

So I asked mevish whatever it is that you want to talk about

but you can't, write it down in a letter.

As soon as I picked up the letters, I opened them.

There was a few of them and I read through them.

The letters described in detail what had happened to shafilea.

She described how scared she was,

that you were not allowed to talk about shafilea

and essentially they, mr and mrs Ahmed, had killed her.

I was shocked.

I was really upset that's actually what happened to shafilea.

As a young shahin tried to process what she'd discovered,

mevish demanded that shahin handed the letters back,

worried her parents might find out.

It was a very clear that she was very scared at home.

The night before I was supposed to meet her to hand them back over,

I made photocopies.

So I wanted to be able to give her her copies back

but to be able to understand her and keep hold of it,

in case it would help her in some... Some way.

In cases of honour-based violence, the honour

and the behaviour of the child that could bring shame on the family

is considered more important than the life of the child.

There's a saying that we all know, "blood is thicker than water."

In families whose support honour-based violence,

there's a saying and that is that "honour is thicker than blood."

So I think it's really important that we...

..We kind of contest these terms and the harm that they cause

because there is no honour in murder.

Emboldened by alesha's bravery in testifying against her parents,

shahin agreed to share her copies of the letters

with geraint Jones and his team.

At that point I said, ok, I know what I know

and it's going to be really difficult and I still have

these letters and I know it means that the girl

who I considered my best friend, that she would hate me.

But what pushed me forward was knowing this was about shafilea

and you have to do what's right.

Shahin's evidence on its own was compelling

and added to everything else, it crushed mr and mrs Ahmed's defence.

It corroborates what is evidence that could fall over

and the case was not just based on that.

There was so much more to this case,

but obviously a key element was alesha's evidence

and now corroborated by new evidence.

At last, with the body of evidence stacked against them,

the previously indestructible unity end wall of silence crumbled.

Farzana puts forward a different defence,

basically blaming iftikhar.

According to a statement, farzana Ahmed said she had seen

her husband attack shafilea.

But that she had tried to stop him but had been punched by him

with a clenched fist.

It's a very credible account that she came up with,

clearly a false one but had she made that account to the police in 2004,

it may well have been that iftikhar would have been on trial alone.

But the fact is they only did it to try and get off it

but it didn't work.

On the 3rd August 2012,

after the extraordinary determination of geraint Jones

and his investigating team to keep this case alive,

iftikhar and farzana Ahmed were found guilty

of brutally murdering their own daughter.

They tried to control her, to force her into marriage

and to prevent her from expressing herself.

When this failed, they murdered her.

Both parents were sentenced to 25 years in prison.

And that was a really big moment for everyone in this case.

In all the time I've done in the police,

there's probably been no-one braver than alesha

and credit to her to come forward.

I remember mrs Ahmed didn't seem to show much of a reaction,

whereas mr Ahmed swore at geraint Jones

as he was led down to the cells.

And I caught sight of that, I watched him

because I was looking for his reaction.

He'd just been sentence for murdering his daughter

and his first thought was to swear at the police officer.

Summarised the man, really,

his sheer arrogance and horrible, horrible behaviour.

As a forensic psychologist, I work with offenders who do

the most horrific things, often to people that they love.

What I find really difficult to understand in this type of case

is that how can families who love their children

kill them simply because of their behaviour?

There often isn't that -

it's simply a need to control their child

and that, for me, is even more evil than anything I come across.

Justice had been done in this case.

Absolutely, 100% justice has been done there.

The case is out of step for me because it was an absolutely

horrific murder of a young girl who had her whole life.

And to be taken away from her in such circumstances,

where her own parents killed her,

it beggars belief, really.

The legacy of the shafilea case is that a nine-year journey

that didn't end in 2012, it continues

and that we should never forget, really, shafilea,

and we should always remember what it's about.

And, you know, try and stop any more shafilea cases.

It's so important.

..The horrific murder of two teenage friends in Edinburgh...

It was kind of like the death of innocence, a turning point.

..Becomes one of the UK's longest running cold cases.

We just needed time for technology to catch up.