Tyndale: Khyra Ishaq case report is sorry reading

Aug 1 2010

READING report Case Number 14 is to go on a journey into hell – a preventable, man-made hell.

Following a 999 call from an apparently concerned mother, an ambulance crew attends a terrace property.

On an upstairs mattress, a child is found lying. She has been hit with a cane. She is not breathing. There is no heartbeat.

Medics begin resuscitation techniques but within 35 minutes the girl is declared dead at a hospital A&E department.

The cause of death is recorded as bronchial pneumonia and septicaemia with bacterial meningitis.

But the explanation for the total failure of this seven year-old’s life support system is to be found in what comes next in the report: the girl’s weight was so low it could not be plotted on a body mass index chart.

Khyra Ishaq died at her home in Handsworth like a famine victim. She had fallen off the statistical spectrum, just as she had fallen off the radar of bungling social workers.

All but one of her five siblings were malnourished except one who had devised “survival strategies”. Some of the children suffered from re-feeding syndrome, a condition first diagnosed in Far East prisoner of war camps after the Second World War.

As early as 2001, some seven years before Khyra’s death, some of the children went to A&E after swallowing mouse poison. We will never know if this truly was an accident, or the first indication of the domestic torture that was to follow.

The Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board (BSCB) has now released its long-awaited report into the killing of Khyra.