“Don’t let my husband come near me. He pushed me.
These were among the last words spoken by Fawziyah Javed, a 31-year-old British lawyer, as she lay seriously injured on a rocky Scottish hillside, 15 meters below the cliff where she was hiking with her husband. She was 17 weeks pregnant and had just told him she wanted a divorce.
Javed had been married to Kashif Anwar, then 27, for less than nine months when she succumbed to her injuries that night in September 2021. At the top of the cliff, a Scottish landmark known as Arthur’s Seat, Anwar told passersby that he did not do it. had a cell phone and asked them to call the police. He claimed he and his wife both tripped, but he managed to right himself while she fell to the slope below.
But the evidence tells a different story, according to numerous witnesses who testified at Anwar’s trial for his wife’s murder.
No voice was louder than that of the woman he had killed.
Her account and the evidence she had collected documenting her husband’s abuse made Javed a star witness at the trial for his own murder. The trial, which took place in Edinburgh in March 2023, is the focus of ‘The Push: Murder on a Cliff’, a gripping new documentary currently airing on Channel 4 in the UK.
Javed, an employment lawyer, was the only child of Mohammed and Yasmin Javed, second-generation British Pakistanis. The small family was extremely close-knit and Fawziyah and her mother had a special bond.
“She was more than a girl,” Yasmin said on “The Push.” “She was my best friend.”
Javed first met Anwar, an optical assistant, while she was helping his mother choose new glasses in Leeds, the northern English city where the family lived. The two began dating, got engaged the following July, and married in December 2020.
Yasmin Javed said her son-in-law seemed “very charming, very charismatic, polite and well-mannered” – a facade he instantly dropped when he became angry. “He was a Jekyll and Hyde character,” she said, who used coercive control and violence to try to force his wife into submission.
Javed’s final statement alone might not have been enough to convict her husband. However, she contributed to the prosecution’s defense in other crucial ways.
As Anwar’s abuse escalated from threats and intimidation to physical assault, Javed contacted the police twice. She didn’t want to press charges, she said, but she wanted a report that she reported the abuse.
Police cameras rolled as Javed told officers that about three months after they were married, Anwar held a pillow over his face and hit him repeatedly. In another incident, he knocked her unconscious, she said.
Jurors saw video of those two police interrogations, the second of which took place just six days before Javed’s death. Secret recordings of conversations with her husband were also played in court. Anwar refused to testify in his own defense, so aside from the emergency call, his threats to his wife were the only words the jury heard from him.
The power dynamic in the couple’s relationship changed almost instantly after their marriage, when Javed moved in with Anwar and his parents. The Anwars were waiting for the new the bride must be submissive and prioritize her relationship with them over her own parents – a tradition that Javed and his relatives opposed.
The Javeds did not believe that women should be subordinate to men. Both Fawziyah and Yasmin were members of the UK Muslim Women’s Networkwhich works to promote social justice and equality for Muslim women and girls.
After her marriage, Javed fought to maintain her independence, working full-time and volunteering for several charitable causes. She also had her own bank account from which prosecutors say her husband deducted 12,000 pounds, or nearly $15,000, while she slept.
Javed briefly left her husband to stay with her parents, which angered Anwar. Her misogyny and controlling behavior was evident in a phone call she recorded and played in court.
“Who do you think you are?” he ordered. “You are not a man… so come back tomorrow as you were told. Don’t be that ‘British woman'”, that is to say an independent woman who enjoyed autonomy outside of his marriage.
“You are a disease in everyone’s life,” he said in another call while Javed was staying with his family, whom he had also threatened earlier. “The sooner you die, the sooner you will leave my life. It will be better.
Yasmin Javed said her daughter was considering leaving her husband within a few days when she accompanied him on a four-night trip to Edinburgh. It was surprising that she agreed to a sunset hike because she was afraid of heights and tired easily because of her pregnancy, her mother said.
Just a day before the hike, other hotel guests were so alarmed to hear Anwar shouting at Javed repeatedly that they notified authorities.
The police officer who first arrived at the scene of his death said he found Javed “writhing in pain” but still able to speak.
Javed reiterated what she said to a passerby, adding that her husband pushed her because she told him she “wanted to end” their marriage.
Javed was terrified, the officer said. “Am I going to die?” Will my baby die? she asked, according to the officer.
Doctors arrived, but Javed’s condition deteriorated. She lost consciousness and CPR attempts failed. She was pronounced dead at 10:18 p.m.
Anwar was convicted and sentenced in April 2023 to 20 years to life in prison.
“The Push: Murder on a Cliff” is broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom The channel did not respond to HuffPost’s questions about the availability of the program in the United States
Need help? In the United States, call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for National Domestic Violence Hotline.
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