[2025] EWHC 2114 (KB)

The claimant, Mr Ari Mahmod, was convicted on 11 June 2007 of the murder of his niece, Ms Banaz Mahmod. He is currently serving a life sentence of imprisonment at HMP Whitemoor and appeared at the hearing before me, representing himself, on a live-link from prison.

On 30 October 2023, the claimant issued a defamation claim against the defendant, ITV plc, in the County Court Civil Business Centre in relation to statements made in a documentary broadcast by the defendant on 31 October 2012 concerning the life and death of Banaz Mahmod and in a two-part drama, which dramatized the investigation of Ms Mahmod’s murder and the subsequent criminal trials. The two-part drama was originally broadcast on 28 and 29 September 2020 and has been accessible via the ITV Hub streaming service and then later via the ITVX streaming service (which replaced ITV Hub in 2022) since the date of the first broadcast.

Mr Mahmod does not deny that he has been convicted, along with others, of murdering Ms Mahmod.

The prosecution’s case was that Ms Mahmod was murdered by members of her family, including the claimant, because they disapproved of her romantic relationship with a man named Rahmat Sulemani. The prosecution maintained that the claimant was the dominant member of the family group that killed Ms Mahmod, that he gave the order to kill her, and that the order to kill was carried out by others.

Both the documentary and the two-part drama allege that Ms Mahmod was also brutally raped by the men who actually killed her, namely, Mohammed Hama, Mohammed Ali, and Omar Hussein. The essence of Mr Mahmod’s complaint against the defendant is that he has been defamed by the rape allegation, given its association with Ms Mahmod’s murder, because of the implication that the claimant must either have also ordered her rape or must otherwise have been complicit in its occurrence, for example, by approving or, at any rate, allowing it.

The claimant also maintains that there is no credible evidence that Ms Mahmod was actually raped and that the defendant was wrong to suggest otherwise in the documentary and in the two-part drama.

This claim has a somewhat complex procedural history to which I will return. The matters for me to determine are:

There are apparently some ancillary applications that remain outstanding, but it appears that once the matters set out in [7] above have been resolved, those other applications will either fall away or can be resolved as consequential matters following hand-down of this judgment.