Crime Commissioner was forced to resign after interfering in murder trial.

 

Councillor Tafheen Sharif

Tomorrow, 23rd May 2023, Tafheen Sharif, a Labour councillor from Mossley, will be confirmed as the new civic Mayor for Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council for the year 2023 -2024. She will make history by becoming Tameside's first Muslim and ethnic minority mayor. Councillor Sharif, who comes from Luton, in Bedfordshire, is a law graduate and a Justice of the Peace. She has represented Mossley since 2016.

From 2012 to 2014, councillor Sharif was deputy police and crime commissioner for Bedfordshire. As a PCC she was forced into resigning her position in 2014, after she attempted to interfere in a murder plot trial involving a cousin, who was involved in a love triangle, that led to her fiancé, Antif Ali, 28, being shot by a hired hitman. It was alleged that councillor Sharif had used her position to try and get a judge to stop her cousin's name from being made public, as it would have revealed embarrassing details about her tangled love life. Her cousin, Naveem Dadd - who was also involved in another relationship with a rival suitor, Shahzad Mahroof - was a witness and gave evidence in the trial.

Mahroof had hired the contract killer, Bernard Pillay, to kill Mr Ali. In May 2013, Pillay rammed Mr Ali's car off the road while he was driving in Luton. When Mr Ali got out of his car, he was shot in the leg with a sawn-off shotgun, which left him with life-changing injuries. Police and court officials said that this unauthorised approach by councillor Sharif, could have led to the case being abandoned at great cost, and they were forced to step in and to report her. Her boss, Olly Martins, the Labour Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire, told her that her position was untenable and Sharif was forced to resign her position in July 2014.

Mahroof, 28, and Pillay, 41, were found guilty of conspiracy to murder and given life imprisonment. The Bedfordshire police and crime panel referred Tafheen Sharif to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), to establish if any crime had been committed.