Detective stories can be fascinating: I love '24 Hours in Police Custody' and similar shows, which use contemporary footage to chart police investigations as they happened. 'TikTok: Muder Gone Viral', however, can only reconstruct events after the fact, with tabloid journalists filling in the gaps. The underlying crime is tawdry and ultimately tragic: after the end of a sexual relationship with a striking age gap, the rejected party attempts to extort the other, who then has her friends drive them off the road. The link to TikTok is rather faint: the woman, and her daughter, had both become semi-famous on the social network, but that's all. One can wonder if this fame had gone to their heads, or if it's a certain sort of crazy person who seeks viral fame in the first place; but the programme provides no insight into this. One reason '24 Hours' works is that it often invokes sympathy, for the victims and sometimes even for the criminals; but we don't learn enough about any of the protagonists here to truly understand them.
2 Reviews
Social Media Murderesses
Lejink31 January 2024
Warning: Spoilers
It's way past midnight outside Leicester and young men, Saqib Hussain and Hashim Ijazuddin are driving their car at breakneck speed, being pursued by two other cars. 21-year-old Saqib frantically calls the police from his mobile phone, terrified for his and his friends's lives as the car immediately behind them makes to ram them off the road. All this is caught on the police audio records and CC TV. Just minutes later, out of sight of the cameras, the car is a blazing inferno, having ploughed through a crash barrier, giving the two occupants absolutely no chance of survival and consigning them to a truly horrific death.
That's the shockingly dramatic beginning of this hour-long ITV true-crime documentary which goes onto quickly implicate a young female Asian woman Mahek Bukhari and her 45-year-old mother Ansreen Mahek who between them have built up a significant following on social media and in particular on the Tik-Tok app.
The chasing cars and their occupants are very quickly traced to the pair, both of whom were in the leading car. The story unfolds of an illicit affair between the married Ansreen and the apparently besotted Saqib, who, when she breaks up with him, desperately tries to blackmail her into returning to him by threatening to make public personal texts and photos of her in return for £3000. Saqib had only got to know the older woman by initially following Mahek on social media.
Mahek and her mother corral six of their followers into luring Saqib to a remote location to try and recover the offending phone and no doubt teach him a lesson but when the two young men realise that they're walking into a trap and try to flee in their car, it's taken way too far with the awful outcome we see at the outset.
The programme then goes into the background of the two women at the heart of the plot, Mahek, who appears to be a self-absorbed young woman who finds a ready audience for her social media posts and her mother Asreena who not only freely joins her daughter in her posts but also goes out clubbing with her to all hours and of course even takes on a young lover in the form of the unwitting Saqib.
Seven of the eight occupants (strangely, the unnamed eighth person was acquitted of wrong-doing and indeed apparently provided incriminating testimony against their fellow passengers) including the mother and daughter were duly convicted of murder and / or manslaughter, the duo now infamously being the first ever mother and daughter convicted together of murder and with the others, given lengthy prison sentences.
The programme, while accurately exposing the venality and lack of remorse of the killers and in particular the highlighted duo also quite rightly shows the devastating impact on the grieving families of their incalculable loss. The programme makes dramatic use of the available audio and visual evidence, interviews with the police investigators into the case and including body-cam and interview-room footage of Mahek, whose narcissism leads her into talking (and lying) freely during her police interview while her mother and other accomplices follow the usual "No Comment" routine. Not that it availed them any, I'm glad to say.
At the end, I was pleased to see justice for the two families which had both suffered such tragic losses in the same way that it was gratifying to see justice meted out to the callous and uncaring offenders. In the end it's the shocking footage of the flaming car which stays in the memory, that and and the apparent lack of remorse shown by the perpetrators to their victims.
That's the shockingly dramatic beginning of this hour-long ITV true-crime documentary which goes onto quickly implicate a young female Asian woman Mahek Bukhari and her 45-year-old mother Ansreen Mahek who between them have built up a significant following on social media and in particular on the Tik-Tok app.
The chasing cars and their occupants are very quickly traced to the pair, both of whom were in the leading car. The story unfolds of an illicit affair between the married Ansreen and the apparently besotted Saqib, who, when she breaks up with him, desperately tries to blackmail her into returning to him by threatening to make public personal texts and photos of her in return for £3000. Saqib had only got to know the older woman by initially following Mahek on social media.
Mahek and her mother corral six of their followers into luring Saqib to a remote location to try and recover the offending phone and no doubt teach him a lesson but when the two young men realise that they're walking into a trap and try to flee in their car, it's taken way too far with the awful outcome we see at the outset.
The programme then goes into the background of the two women at the heart of the plot, Mahek, who appears to be a self-absorbed young woman who finds a ready audience for her social media posts and her mother Asreena who not only freely joins her daughter in her posts but also goes out clubbing with her to all hours and of course even takes on a young lover in the form of the unwitting Saqib.
Seven of the eight occupants (strangely, the unnamed eighth person was acquitted of wrong-doing and indeed apparently provided incriminating testimony against their fellow passengers) including the mother and daughter were duly convicted of murder and / or manslaughter, the duo now infamously being the first ever mother and daughter convicted together of murder and with the others, given lengthy prison sentences.
The programme, while accurately exposing the venality and lack of remorse of the killers and in particular the highlighted duo also quite rightly shows the devastating impact on the grieving families of their incalculable loss. The programme makes dramatic use of the available audio and visual evidence, interviews with the police investigators into the case and including body-cam and interview-room footage of Mahek, whose narcissism leads her into talking (and lying) freely during her police interview while her mother and other accomplices follow the usual "No Comment" routine. Not that it availed them any, I'm glad to say.
At the end, I was pleased to see justice for the two families which had both suffered such tragic losses in the same way that it was gratifying to see justice meted out to the callous and uncaring offenders. In the end it's the shocking footage of the flaming car which stays in the memory, that and and the apparent lack of remorse shown by the perpetrators to their victims.
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