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Muslim in secret divorce is jailed
A disgraced religious scholar is starting a two-year prison sentence after he divorced his paraplegic wife behind her back.
Former prison imam Khalil Kazi falsified divorce papers and perjured himself in a plot to marry another woman and ensure he still had access to his first wife's 1m compensation from a hospital negligence claim.
The father-of-two, of Warwick Road, Batley Carr, was found guilty by a jury at Leeds Crown Court on Tuesday of perverting the course of justice and perjury.
Yesterday Judge Scott Wolstenholme, sitting at Bradford Crown Court, heard that Kazi, who was also an imam at a Batley mosque and a community faith development officer for the Kirklees faith forum, had been married to first wife Meimouna for nine years.
But in 2004 he met Bouchra Laroussi in Morocco. He spons-ored her in an unsuccessful app-lication to enter the United Kingdom as a minister of religion.
He decided to divorce his first wife but had no grounds under English law and also faced losing any control of the compensation she was about to receive for being severely disabled as a result of complications when giving birth.
Kazi, 39, arranged for her signature to be forged on documents relating to the divorce and in January 2005 solemnly affirmed before a court official that the divorce papers' contents were true and his wife had signed them.
The next day he went with his wife as a married couple to see a financial adviser about the invest-ment of Meimouna's pay-out.
Several months earlier Kazi had travelled to Morocco, where he went through an Islamic marriage ceremony with Bouchra Laroussi.
Meimouna found out about the divorce when she decided to separate from him in early 2006.
Kazi was described by his barrister Mohammed Nawaz as a pillar of the community.
After the hearing Meimouna said Kazi had brought matters on himself and he deserved it for what he had done to her.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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