Nine years for stepmother who tortured baby

Sumairia Parveen, 24, who had begun an affair with her cousin after walking out on her husband, "hated" 17-month-old Tahla Ikram who she feared threatened their relationship.

While showering love on her own daughter, she subjected helpless Tahla to weeks of abuse in the hope he would be taken into care.

The boy's father, Abid Ikram, 30, "stood by and did nothing" and has also received a nine-year sentence.

The child suffered a series of fractures and bruises as his limbs were "twisted and pulled", he was burnt with a cigarette and even had his leg progressively sliced open until the wound was so deep tendons and veins were exposed.

Many of his injuries were ignored for days, causing him to scream as his broken bones ground together.

The child - who months earlier had been in temporary care after police found him home alone - finally died in his cot, next to his father's double bed, on September 6 last year.

Ambulance staff called to the family home in Acton, west London, found the little boy cold, stiff and without a single sign of life.

Both Ikram and Parveen spent more than a week protesting their innocence at Southwark Crown Court.

While he wept as he told the court he "would never have hurt my son", she tearfully insisted she had loved him as if he "was my own".

But those trying the case took just six hours over two days to unanimously decide they were lying.

Parveen, who had her lover's baby in prison, was convicted last month of the "causing or allowing" offence - a relatively new one designed to cure a legal loophole that has seen many parents walk free because juries could not be sure who was responsible for a child's suffering.

Ikram, who once beat his son with a plastic cricket bat on her orders, was found guilty of the same charge, as well as perverting the course of justice for sending his lover to Pakistan after his son's death.