Mum forgives her daughters’ killer but not cops who took pictures of them
A mum whose daughters were stabbed to death in a London park said she has forgiven their killer – but not the police officers who shared pictures of their bodies in a group chat.
Sisters Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, were brutally murdered at Fryent Country Park in Wembley in June 2020 after they’d met up to celebrate Bibaa’s birthday.
They were repeatedly knifed by Danyal Hussein, a teenager who had pledged to sacrifice six women every six months in a pact with a demon he signed with his own blood.
The mother of the two women, Mina Smallman, says she has forgiven Hussein for his barbaric actions.
However, she says she still cannot forgive PCs Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer for snapping images of their corpses and sharing them with others on WhatsApp.
‘Obviously what they did wasn’t as bad as murdering,’ she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
‘But you are telling me that you have violated our girls further by doing this? Them I haven’t forgiven.’
Lewis and Jaffer had been deployed to guard the scene where the two siblings had been found in bushes.
But they instead abandoned their post and chose to take pictures of their bodies, later describing them as ‘dead birds’ on a group chat with friends and colleagues.
They were both jailed for two years and nine months in 2021 after pleading guilty to misconduct in a public office.
During sentencing, Judge Mark Lucraft condemned their ‘appalling and inexplicable conduct’, saying they disregarded the victims’ privacy for ‘a cheap thrill’ or ‘some form of bragging rights’.
When they were released from prison early last year, Mina said she attempted to take her own life.
In an incident she discusses in her book A Better Tomorrow: Life Lessons in Hope and Strength, she said: ‘I just thought: “I don’t want to be here.” I’ve had enough. And yeah – I attempted suicide.’
Describing the moment she found out about what PCs Lewis and Jaffer had done, Mina said she sat anxiously waiting to speak to police with her husband Chris who asked her: ‘Mina, come on, what could they possibly tell us that could be worse than what we’ve heard?
‘And I thought yeah you’re right, I don’t need to be anxious. But when you’re like a walking bombshell and your entire being is on a knife edge, anything that I had left had gone. I had no reserve.’
Mina has since campaigned strongly for women’s safety and has been calling for the Met Police to ‘reform’ – as well as meeting with officers within the force and other local authorities.
She said: ‘Someone found it really strange: “You’ve forgiven the killer but you can’t forgive the police officers?”
‘But it’s not a question of I can’t, it’s a question of actually, that has given me the impetus to keep on reforming and working with the Met.’
Earlier this month, she called for more black officers to be deployed in London when appearing at the launch of the Alliance for Police Accountability (APA), a group of bodies fighting racism and misogyny in the police.
Mina said the police need to take online misogynistic radicalisation of young men more seriously, but does still have faith in the force.
‘The majority of the police are good people,’ she added.
Hussein was jailed for life with a minimum term of 35 years.