A mother brutally beat her seven-year-old son to death with a stick then set his body on fire because he was struggling to commit passages from the Koran to memory, a court was told. Sara Ege, 32, is alleged to have beaten Yaseen Ali 'like a dog' for failing to recite passages from the religious text, before burning his body at the family home in Cardiff to try and cover up what she had done.
Ege is also accused of abusing her son in the months leading up to his death, allegedly beating him with a hammer and locking him in a shed for falling behind with his Islamic studies. The trial at Cardiff Crown Court heard how the university graduate and her husband Yousuf Ege had enrolled Yaseen in advanced classes at their local mosque and hoped he would become Hafiz - an Islamic term for someone who has memorised the Koran.