Divorced wife tells of day she was shot

Neelam Amjid said she turned and fled but could feel bullets hitting her as she tried to get away.

She told Leeds Crown Court yesterday she had arranged to meet Mir Hamza Khalid, in Lahore, Pakistan, in March last year to pick up some money from her ex-husband, who lived in Yorkshire, but as she approached him “I had an instinct, I wasn’t comfortable so I didn’t go too close.”

She said hello to Hamza and when he replied, asked him ‘I’ve got nothing to worry about, have I?”

Robert Smith, QC, prosecuting, asked her why she said that to him. “I don’t know, I just had a gut feeling something wasn’t right,” she said. “His behaviour changed, I don’t know what it was.”

He told her “No” but then reached for his pockets and she saw he had taken a silver gun out. “I saw him pull the trigger back, at that point I turned and ran.”

She could feel heat on her back. “It was like hot water but I knew it was blood.” She could also hear shots being fired but did not know how many times she had been hit. “I knew it was more than once.”

Miss Amjid kept running towards the car which had brought her to the meeting, driven by Waqas Saeed, the man she had gone to live with after meeting him through Facebook. But as she shouted at him that she had been shot she saw it move away.

She said she did not understand what was happening and only later in hospital discovered Mr Saeed had also been shot.

Still on her feet, she crossed the road trying to get help and eventually a group of men came to her aid and she was taken in a rickshaw to the local hospital.

The prosecution claims the shooting was plotted from Yorkshire by her ex-husband Amjid Ali who felt shamed by their divorce and recruited his brother-in-law Adnan Khalid and others including Mir Hamza Khalid, one of Khalid’s brothers.

Ali, 42, of Aysgarth Road, Healey, Batley, and Khalid, 25, of Fairview Avenue, Carlinghow, Batley, both deny conspiracy to murder her on March 31 last year.

The jury has heard she was shot five times but the bullets passed through her body missing vital organs. Mr Saeed was not so fortunate; he was hit in the spine and is paralysed from the waist down.

The 32-year-old complainant, giving evidence from behind screens, told the jury she married Ali at the age of 17. They were cousins and it was an arranged marriage in Pakistan. “I was asked if I was okay about it, well we were brought up that way with the parents making the decision.”

She returned to Yorkshire where she was born and he later joined her. They had four children but although happy to start with her feelings changed because she said her husband was “violent towards me and abusive.”

Eventually she told him she wanted a divorce and they obtained one under the Islamic religion before she went to Pakistan to meet Mr Saeed whom she had “become close to” after meeting him through Facebook.

She was staying with him and his family for the second time when the meeting was arranged for her to pick up the money on the night of March 31.

The trial continues.