Pizza shop owner guilty of murdering wife and leaving her in unmarked grave

Zobaidah Salangy went undiscovered by police for more than six months despite extensive searches

Nezam Salangy was married to his wife, Zobaidah Salangy (pictured), for eight years (West Mercia Police)

The owner of a pizza shop has been found guilty of murdering his wife and leaving her body in an unmarked grave for six months.

Nezam Salangy, 44, was convicted at Worcester Crown Court of killing his wife of eight years, Zobaidah Salangy, on 28 March 2020.

After murdering her, Salangy buried Zobaidah in woodland near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.

She went undiscovered by police for more than six months despite extensive searches.

The killer’s younger brothers - Mohammed Yasin, 34, and Mohammed Ramin Salangy, 31 - were also found guilty of helping to cover up the crime.

Mohammed Ramin Salangy, who worked with his two brothers in the pizza shop, travelled 90 miles by taxi from his and Yasin’s home in Adamscroft Place, Cardiff, Wales, to help bury Zobaidah.

Nezam Salangy, of Talbot Road, Bromsgrove, later reported his spouse missing to police, telling them “she had gone out for a run and never come back”, after leaving him for a “new boyfriend”, prosecutors said.

At the start of the six-week trial, Simon Denison QC opened the Crown’s case by saying it was an “unfortunate fact” of the case that Zobaidah’s body was initially missed by police, when a first dig at the site near the Worcestershire village of Lower Bentley took place in April 2020.

Ms Salangy’s exact cause of death has been impossible to determine as a result of the “six-and-a-half months between her death and her body being discovered”, he said.

Mr Denison said: “They mistook a hard layer of soil that they reached to be a natural base below which no-one would dig.

“So they abandoned the search there and they didn’t find the body at that stage.”

But officers - “convinced she must be there” - returned to the location in October 2020, and this time “found Zobaidah’s body”.

The court was told that her body was discovered bound in curtain wire and wrapped in black bin bags and a duvet cover.

The design of the duvet matched the pillow cases found at Salangy’s three-bed terrace address in Talbot Road, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire - close to the convicted killer’s Prego Pizza shop, in nearby Austin Road.

Ms Salangy’s phone and black purse - containing her driving licence and cash - was found hidden behind other items, in bubble wrap, on a shelf in the pizza parlour, packaged up with a second phone which Mr Salangy used to make arrangements with his two brothers to conceal the murder.

His fingerprints were found on the box containing both phones.

On March 27, the day before Mrs Salangy’s disappearance, jurors heard the couple “argued bitterly”, with part of the row video recorded by Salangy on his phone.

In the footage, Mrs Salangy “was saying ‘keep filming for the eight years he is destroying my life”’.

The prosecuting barrister said that the next day “Zobaidah Salangy vanished off the face of the earth”.

In the days afterwards, Salangy told people his wife had left him “forever”, claiming she sent text messages telling of a “new boyfriend”, “intended to leave the UK - which she hated - and return to Afghanistan”.

Jurors heard Mrs Salangy had been a maths teacher in Afghanistan and that her November 2012 nuptials to Salangy, then already living in the UK, had been an arranged marriage.

She moved to the UK in October 2013 to live with Salangy, with jurors told the victim was attending night-school English classes twice a week, intending to either resume maths teaching or become a midwife.

Mr Denison told jurors “the overall picture of what these defendants did becomes absolutely clear”, adding it was a crime that was “truly shocking and desperately sad”.

Salangy, of Talbot Road, Bromsgrove, and Yasin and Ramin Salangy, both of Adamscroft Place, Cardiff, were told by Mr Justice Hilliard they would be sentenced on a date in June.

The three brothers appeared to show no reaction as the verdicts were read, but as he left the dock in the care of security guards, Nezam Salangy stared at several West Mercia Police detectives who had conducted the investigation, telling them “you guys framed me.”