A 22-year-old woman who feared her husband would kill her was stabbed to death alongside her mother after repeatedly turning to police for protection, according to reports.
Raneem Oudeh had contacted officers four times within two hours seeking help over Janbaz Tarin, 21. She was eventually advised to return to her mother’s home in Solihull. But when she arrived, Tarin was hiding nearby in a bush with a 13-inch knife.
He attacked Oudeh and her 49-year-old mother, Khaola Saleem, killing both women outside the family home.
The double murder took place in 2018, but the case has received renewed attention after being revisited in ITV’s Murder UK series.
A chilling warning before her death
Oudeh’s aunt, Nour Norris, recalled that her niece had expressed fears about what Tarin might do.
“She said to me, ‘Auntie, I think he’s going to kill me.’ And I said, ‘We have the police. You need to report all of this.'”
According to Norris, Oudeh replied that she had already approached police but believed “they are not going to do anything” because Tarin was “very good at manipulating them”.
Tarin was arrested three days after the killings.
A new life in Britain
Oudeh had met Tarin when she was 19, not long after her family fled war-torn Syria and settled in Britain.
Her aunt described a young woman who had arrived in the UK optimistic about her future.
“When she came, she loved it. She had a great voice and wanted to be a singer one day. She had all the hopes in the world when she came to the UK. She was happy to just study and she didn’t want anything else, really. I don’t think she really wanted a man in her life.”
According to The Sun, Tarin met Oudeh at Solihull College and began persistently pursuing her. He repeatedly called her and told her “you’ll be mine”.
Norris said Tarin presented himself as a dominant personality but could also appear generous to those around him.
“He had a very strong character and was ‘I’m the man here’, and everyone, in some ways, thought he was great,” she said. “He’d spend a lot of money on everybody. He’d buy her lunch … and was very much a man of control.”
Tarin returned to her life in 2016
Tarin temporarily stopped pursuing Oudeh when she married another man. That relationship later ended just days before she gave birth to their child.
In June 2016, Tarin came back into her life. According to reports, he threatened to hurt her family unless she agreed to marry him.
Norris said she believed her niece was attempting to manage a dangerous situation without fully understanding what it would become.
“I think she was trying to be strong and clever by going along with his plan, but didn’t know what she was going along with,” she said.
The pair married in an Islamic ceremony that September. The ceremony was not legally recognised in the UK. Tarin also threatened to kill Oudeh and her family if she ever left him, according to reports.
His behaviour subsequently became physically and mentally abusive, and Oudeh increasingly withdrew from her relatives.
“She kept disappearing and not wanting anyone to come down to her house,” Norris recalled. “She didn’t want it to end because she knows if he ends it, it’s the end of her life. We knew it was very bad, but we didn’t know how bad it was.”
She finally decided to leave
In 2018, Oudeh discovered that Tarin had a pregnant wife and two children in Afghanistan. She decided to end their relationship.
His harassment then intensified, according to reports. At one point, he spent 12 days sleeping in a car outside her mother’s home.
Oudeh moved in with her mother for safety and obtained a non-molestation order against Tarin, barring him from approaching or contacting her.
But the situation escalated again on the evening she died.
Tarin followed Oudeh and her mother to Rotana Sheesha Bar in Birmingham, where he violently confronted them before being removed from the venue.
Frightened by what had happened, Oudeh contacted police. She and her mother remained inside the restaurant for around half an hour before eventually going back to their car.
Later that night, the two women returned to the family home in Solihull, where Tarin was waiting nearby.