Murder of Zahid Mubarek

Zahid Mubarek was a British Pakistani teenager whose family traced their roots to Pakistan; his grandfather, who had served in the Pakistan Army Corps of Engineers, migrated with his family to East London in 1960. Mubarek was born in 1980, the eldest of three children, and came from a Muslim family with no prior police record. His father worked as a factory manager for 28 years.

Mubarek's contact with the criminal justice system stemmed from a drug dependency that led him to commit a series of offences, mostly related to breaking into cars and theft, over a period of less than ten months. According to HM Inspectorate of Prisons, he was given multiple opportunities to cooperate with community sentencing options but repeatedly failed to attend appointments and, on two occasions, did not appear in court. On 17 January 2000 he was sentenced to 90 days' detention in a young offender institution for five offences, with a similar concurrent sentence added weeks later for four further offences. He served his entire sentence at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution and was a first-time prisoner.

On 8 February 2000, Robert Stewart — who had 17 criminal convictions out of 80 offences, was awaiting trial on harassment charges, and had been diagnosed as a psychopath by a mental health nurse in November 1999 — was moved into Mubarek's cell, the only bed available at the time. The guard responsible reportedly did not have access to Stewart's security files and was unaware of his history of racism. Tensions arose in the cell, including a dispute over cell lighting.

In the early hours of 21 March 2000, just hours before Mubarek's scheduled release, Stewart used a table leg he had broken off two weeks prior to beat his sleeping cellmate between seven and eleven times. He then activated the alarm and, when officers arrived, falsely claimed his cellmate had suffered an accident. Prison officers reported finding Stewart standing over Mubarek covered in blood, holding the table leg. Stewart was moved to a nearby cell, where he washed blood from his hands and clothes before forensic examination and wrote "Just killed me padmate" on the wall, accompanied by a swastika. Mubarek was taken to Charing Cross Hospital, arriving four hours after the attack, where he died.

Stewart was charged and, in November 2000, convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Following the family's campaign, the Law Lords ordered Home Secretary David Blunkett to hold a public inquiry into the killing — a decision described as an unprecedented victory for the family after a four-year wait. The Commission for Racial Equality had already conducted its own investigation prior to the inquiry. The inquiry concluded that Zahid Mubarek died as a result of a combination of his cellmate's racism and systemic failures within the Prison Service.