Woman Converts to Islam, Starves Daughter to Death...

A seven-year-old girl who starved to death had been removed from school after being bullied for wearing Islamic clothes, it emerged today.

Tragic Khyra Ishaq was taunted about her traditional hijab, which eventually led to her mother removing her and her siblings from school about three months ago.
The move apparently prompted social workers to visit the family home

But today it emerged council staff had only been to see Khyra's mother Angela Gordon once - and had never returned.
Khyra and her five brothers and sisters was discovered by paramedics at the house in Handsworth, Birmingham, on Saturday.
The little girl, who one neighbour described as having 'the face of an angel' died in hospital shortly afterwards.
Her emaciated siblings, who are now in council care, were so hungry that they had been seen trying to steal bread left out for the birds.

Khyra had attended Grove School near her home.
Neighbour Melissa Ware, 26, a mother of two, said: "The rumours around here are that Khyra was being bullied at school which is why her mother decided to take her out.
"I heard that because she was wearing a Muslim hijab, other kids were picking on her.
"My children used to play with Khyra and her brothers and sisters. She was a lovely, bubbly little girl. She had a real sparky personality and a face of an angel.

"She had a real innocence about her, it makes what happened to her even more harrowing, if that's at all possible.
"Khyra always was quite a petite little child but she seemed healthy and full of beans. I certainly had no reason to think there was anything untoward."
Melissa added: "I always thought Angela was quite a good mother but you don't know what might have happened since I last spoke to her.
"The house they lived in was OK but it was furnished very minimally.
"I think she was on benefits and didn't work and one of the children was disabled and had to go to a special school.

"When the police were there on Tuesday, I saw them come out with a mattress wrapped up in brown paper to protect it and what looked like bedding in evidence bags.
"There is no impression that Angela was struggling with looking after her children.

"She spoke nicely to them and was really nice and patient.
"The only time her children used to play was when she was with them because they weren't really allowed outside unless she was there.
"I saw the birth dad at the house a few months ago but he left the house about two years ago and has remarried."
Today, fury at Khyra's death - and the role of Birmingham City Council's social services department continued to grow.

Labour MP Khalid Mahmood said he had been told an educational social worker went to the children's family home once but never returned.
Mr Mahmood is now calling for a full-scale inquiry by the City Council into how social workers could have missed the children's plight.
He told GMTV today: "Obviously, something has gone wrong somewhere.
"What I am calling for is Birmingham City Council to look at this, for the chief executive to review the procedures and come back and report to us and let us know what has gone wrong."
The MP for Birmingham Perry Barr has already accused both the local education authority and social services of ' huge incompetence'.

"It just beggars belief that we have allowed this to happen. I understand there was at least one visit by an education social worker after the children left school, but not one follow-up visit," he said last night.
"I find that an amazing dereliction of duty that they have not followed it through. There is some sort of structural failure here. It should not have been allowed to get to this stage.
"We have to be far more stringent with people who don't take their children to school.
"They appear to have allowed the children to disappear out of school, not even with a follow-up call to social services. I find it amazing that six children can go like this and nobody cares."
Child protection officials in Birmingham have so far refused to say whether the family were "known'" to them.

A City Council spokesman said: "We are deeply saddened by the death of this child and our sympathies go to the child's family and friends at this difficult time.
"This death is now the subject of a police inquiry and Birmingham City Council are fully supporting the investigation. We are therefore unable to make any further comment."
Paramedics were called to the house in the early hours of Saturday after they were told a girl was having breathing difficulties.

But after seeing the state of Khyra, her three brothers, aged 12, nine and eight, and two sisters, aged 11 and four, they called police. One paramedic was said to have been in tears.
Officers arrived to find the six starving children lying on mattresses in a bedroom on Saturday. All were seriously emaciated and Khrya died in hospital hours later.

Khyra's mother Angela Gordon, 33, and her live-in boyfriend Junaid Abuhamza, 29, have appeared in court accused of neglect and been remanded in custody.
Court officials said they will face a second charge of causing or allowing the death of a child when they appear again next week.
Agonised questions are now being asked about how yet another child could have been allowed to die such an appalling death.
One neighbour who lives near to the family home said he thought the family must have moved because he had not seen them for so long and demanded that Khyra's school and authorities be investigated for their failure to notice anything was wrong.
He said: "You should really be tough on them at the school and the authorities because they are supposed to be looking after our children.
"I have a daughter at the same school and I asked them, 'Why didn't you do something about the children? If they weren't going to school, the school should have known why.
"The school should have known something. They couldn't tell me, they just said there will be an investigation."
He added that Khyra had been to his house two years ago for a party and stood out because she was "such a happy girl".
"She was positive and smiling and full of life, like children should be."I noticed her because she was such a happy girl", he said.
The case has chilling similarities to that of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, whose death from neglect and abuse at the hands of her aunt and her boyfriend in February 2000 was meant to lead to a massive overhaul of child protection.
It brings back the same questions about how a child could have been allowed to die of hunger and whether child protection officers, teachers, doctors or neighbours were aware the family had problems.

Khyra's aunt Valerie Frances speaks to the press outside the house where her niece died
Miss Gordon - a Muslim convert whose family came to Britain from Jamaica - had told her neighbours the children had been bullied at school, apparently because they wore Muslim clothes.
She was said to have had been making arrangements for them to be taught at home and a pile of English and Maths teaching books could be clearly seen on one of the window ledges yesterday.
Unemployed Miss Gordon, who previously used the name Angela Greenland, has lived in the racially-mixed Handsworth area for more than a decade.
She rented her terraced house from a local housing association.
She lived there initially with Khyra's father Delroy Frances, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abu Zaire Ishaq, but he moved out more than three years ago.
His sister Valerie arrived at the house yesterday, holding a young child, and unaware of her niece's terrible death.

She said she had not seen the children since the beginning of the year, adding: "When I saw them last, they were in perfect health.
"I've been coming here all the time, knocking on the door and no-one came to the door. "I am very unhappy about the way I have found this out. The family should have been told in a proper way. I don't think my brother knows."
The door and ground-floor windows of the house have been covered with metal shutters and forensic experts and police had earlier taken away items including carpets and clothing.
Neighbours were in shock as they watched the activity.
One, who did not wish to be named, said: "We knew they were going through some trouble about a year ago.
"Before that we used to see the children and they looked happy and normal, but after that we didn't see them.

"They seemed like normal, happy kids, but then they disappeared.
"The house wasn't very well kept. It's not the cleanest of places."

Another resident, Lilian Costello, said: "I saw Miss Gordon on Christmas Eve and I wished her a Merry Christmas but she said she didn't celebrate it, she celebrated the Muslim Eid.
"I didn't see her again for another four months.
"When I saw her at the beginning of May, I asked her if she had moved and she said she was still living in the road.

"I asked how the children were and she said they were all right."
Mrs Costello added: "She seemed very devoted to the children. She used to let them come out to play with the other children and she always stood at the front of the house watching them."
Another neighbour, Mohammed Khalil, said he used to see some of the children in their uniforms on their way to the nearby Grove School in Handsworth but that he had not seen them for many months.
A Polish woman living nearby, who gave her name as Marta, said Miss Gordon had recently accused her of giving the children bread.

She said: "The mother was very angry. I told her nobody had given her anything.
"I can only think this poor girl had gone into our back garden and taken bread from the bird table."
The conditions of the other children are not said to be life threatening.