January 2023

Stepdad handed life sentence

A 34-year-old who admitted the murder of his five-year-old stepdaughter has been given a life sentence.

The girl, Nadia Zofia Kalinowska, died in December 2019.

She had been discovered at her family home on Fernagh Drive in Newtownabbey with head and abdominal injuries, including multiple fractures described as being at various stages of healing, and later died

During the opening, Crown barrister Liam McCollum detailed the injuries inflicted on Nadia.

As well as suffering a skull fracture and lacerated liver which caused her death, Nadia had sustained fractures and re-fractures to her ribs, a fractured collarbone, a fractured pelvis and an injury to her bowel.

Also present at Nadia’s time of death were 70 surface injuries including bruising and abrasions.

Prosecutors had in 2020 likened her injuries to those resulting from a road traffic collision.

A murder trial was told this week she had been tortured and killed.

Her stepfather, Pakistani national Abdul Wahab, pleaded guilty to her murder at Belfast Crown Court yesterday – and to a string of assaults on the little girl carried out over a period of several months.

Her mother, 28-year-old Aleksandra Wahab, has also admitted allowing the death of a child and allowing a child to suffer serious physical harm.

Following the guilty pleas yesterday, the jury was discharged.

Mrs Wahab was remanded back into custody to await sentencing.

In June 2018 a health visitor referred Nadia to a community dentist in unusual circumstances due to the condition of her teeth, according to the barrister.

“There was decay in the front teeth, they were recorded as being black in appearance,” he said. But ten months later the referral ended when Nadia failed to attend appointments.

Prosecution also set out how police were struck by the lack of any toys for a child of Nadia’s age in the family’s home.