Murder of the Lowe family

On 5 August 2000, 26-year-old taxi driver Azhar Ali Mehmood started a fire at the Telford home of 16-year-old Lucy Lowe. Mehmood had been in a relationship with Lowe since she was 14 years old and was the father of her child. The fire killed Lucy Lowe, her unborn child, her 17-year-old disabled sister Sarah, and her 49-year-old mother Eileen Linda. Her 53-year-old father, George Lowe, survived. Mehmood escaped the scene with Tasnim, his baby daughter with Lucy Lowe.

According to the case record, Mehmood began the relationship with Lucy Lowe when he was 24 and she was 14, and a year later she became pregnant with their daughter. Lucy Lowe's family later described episodes of abuse, though these were not reported to police at the time. Lucy Lowe's friends described Mehmood as jealous and possessive. Mehmood claimed he had been asleep and escaped through a window after being woken by a smoke alarm, but CCTV recorded him buying petrol shortly before the fire, and traces of petrol were later found in the downstairs rooms of the house, with the three victims trapped upstairs. Police stated during the investigation that they had no evidence the fire was racially motivated, addressing separate contemporaneous concerns in Telford about two other deaths.

In October 2001, Mehmood was sentenced to three life sentences for the three murders and a fourth sentence for the attempted murder of George Lowe. He became eligible for parole after 18 years and has been denied parole on multiple occasions, including in June 2020, September 2022, and July 2025. He appealed his conviction in August 2002 and again in 2014, both unsuccessfully; the 2014 appeal noted that his minimum sentence would have been longer under later sentencing laws.

Following George Lowe's custody of his granddaughter Tasnim, the case drew renewed public attention after a March 2018 Sunday Mirror investigation into the Telford child sexual exploitation scandal, which the investigation described as involving an estimated 1,000 victims since the 1980s. The report stated that the murders were referenced by abusers to intimidate other victims into silence. George Lowe said he had received a threatening anonymous phone call after raising suspicions of grooming.

Later in 2018, Tasnim Lowe made a BBC Three documentary examining her family's murder and possible links to sexual exploitation. During filming, police provided her with her mother's surviving diaries, which described being taken to perform sexual acts on multiple older men. Tasnim Lowe called on West Mercia Police to charge her father with sexual offences; the force did not do so and declined to comment. A 2022 inquiry examined the police handling of the case, during which force members defended the decision not to pursue additional charges, and inquiry leader Tom Crowther criticized two detectives for their lack of cooperation with the inquiry.