Mahek Bukhari, a TikTok influencer from Stoke-on-Trent, became involved in a plan to silence a man who was blackmailing her mother over a secret affair, leading to a high-speed car chase that killed two young men and resulted in life sentences for both women.
Mahek Bukhari was born in 1999 and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. She was well known at school for her sense of fashion.
After finishing school, she enrolled at Manchester Metropolitan University to study fashion but did not complete her degree, choosing instead to build a career online. Her family reportedly had reservations about social media as a full-time job, but she pursued it anyway.
Her mother, Ansreen, was born in Pakistan and moved to the United Kingdom as a young child. She had hoped to become a flight attendant, but her parents did not allow her to attend college.
She entered an arranged marriage with a man named Ali Raza and settled into life as a housewife, raising two children, including Mahek.
In 2017, Mahek began posting videos on YouTube and TikTok under the name MayBVlogs, also known online as May B. Her early content covered beauty tips, fashion hauls, and lifestyle topics, and she worked with several clothing brands on sponsored posts.
She also collaborated with figures from BritAsia TV, including the rapper Raxstar, appearing together in videos reviewing restaurants.
In November 2020, she started her own online retail company, Shoplers Direct, selling women’s clothing and accessories. By 2021, she had built a following of close to 130,000 people on TikTok, along with tens of thousands more on Instagram and YouTube.
Ansreen began appearing alongside her daughter in videos, and the pair became known for their mother-daughter content. Mahek’s audience grew noticeably larger whenever her mother featured in a video, and Ansreen started to enjoy the attention that came with online recognition of her own.
Regional media at the time described Mahek as a confident, business-minded young entrepreneur, part of a new wave of self-made internet personalities building an audience without any background in traditional entertainment.
In 2019, while still married, Ansreen met a young man named Saqib Hussain through a video chat app called Azar. The two exchanged phone numbers and began speaking daily.
Their conversations grew into a sexual relationship that continued for roughly three years. During that time, they met in secret at hotels, shisha lounges, and restaurants in cities including Birmingham and London.
By late 2021, the relationship had begun to break down, and Ansreen decided to end it. Hussain struggled to accept the split. He asked for the return of £3,000 he said he had spent on Ansreen during their time together, and he began threatening her.
He said he would tell her husband and son about the affair and share intimate photographs and videos of her unless he was paid.
Ansreen eventually told Mahek about the affair and the threats being made against her. The mother and daughter were close, and their bond had grown even stronger through their shared work online.
Rather than reporting the blackmail to police, Mahek chose to deal with the situation herself. On 4 January 2022, she sent a message saying she would arrange for men to attack Hussain so that he would not know what had hit him.
Mahek turned to a friend, Rekan Karwan, for help carrying out a plan. Ansreen offered to repay the £3,000 Hussain was demanding, and a meeting was arranged for the early hours of 11 February 2022 in the car park of a Tesco supermarket in Hamilton, Leicester.
Six other people joined the plan over the following weeks: Raees Jamal, his cousin Ameer Jamal, Sanaf Gulammustafa, Natasha Akhtar, and Mohammed Patel, in addition to Karwan.
Two cars were readied for the meeting, an Audi TT driven by Karwan and a Seat Leon driven by Raees Jamal. Six of the eight people involved carried balaclavas or masks, and a wheel brace and a curved metal tool were placed inside the vehicles.
Prosecutors later said the goal was to take Hussain’s phone, delete the images he held, and frighten him into silence. At the time, Mahek was 22 years old and her mother was 46.
Hussain did not know how to drive, so he asked a friend, Mohammed Hashim Ijazuddin, to take him to Leicester in his Škoda Fabia. Ijazuddin was not aware of any dispute between Hussain and the Bukharis.
He agreed to make the trip simply as a favor to his friend, and the two men set off from Banbury, Oxfordshire, shortly after midnight.
When Hussain and Ijazuddin reached the Tesco car park at around 1:17am, they found two vehicles waiting instead of the two women they expected. Sensing something was wrong, they left without stopping. The Audi and the Seat followed close behind.
Over the following minutes, the three cars passed through a roundabout several times and ran through a red light before reaching the A46 dual carriageway. The two pursuing vehicles kept an open phone line between them for fourteen minutes as the chase continued.
A satellite tracking device fitted to the Audi, which had been hired for the night, later helped investigators confirm that it reached speeds of up to 97mph, while a forensic investigation found the Škoda had reached speeds of up to 89mph.
At around 1:28am, Hussain called 999 from the passenger seat of the Škoda. He told the operator that he and his friend were being followed by two vehicles whose occupants wore balaclavas and were trying to ram them off the road.
Toward the end of the call, he said, “I’m begging you, I’m gonna die, I think I’m gonna die.” Screams were heard, and the line cut off at 1:33am.
Moments later, the Škoda left the road near the Six Hills junction on the A46. It struck a barrier in the central reservation, hit a tree, and split into two pieces before catching fire.
Hussain and Ijazuddin, both 21 years old, died instantly from the impact, before the flames took hold. A passing motorist reported seeing the burning wreckage, and Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service was sent to put out the blaze.
Further along the road, the occupants of the pursuing cars stopped briefly to check the Audi for damage before continuing on their way. They drove back past the burning wreckage without stopping to help.
The group returned to Leicester and later split up. Akhtar, who owned the Seat Leon, headed home to Birmingham, while the Bukharis and the others made their way back to Stoke-on-Trent.
During his 999 call, Hussain had given the operator details that allowed police to identify the vehicles involved. Officers used automatic number plate recognition cameras to trace the cars, and within about ten hours they had located those responsible.
Ansreen, Mahek, and Akhtar were arrested that same morning. When questioned by police at their door, Mahek claimed that she and her mother had spent the previous evening in Nottingham, an account that quickly fell apart under further questioning.
Raees Jamal and Karwan were arrested three days later, and Ameer Jamal and Gulammustafa were arrested the following month.
A forensic collision investigator examined both vehicles and found damage to the front of the Seat Leon that matched the rear of the Škoda. A forensic scientist also examined DNA evidence recovered from both cars.
Investigators recovered a wheel brace from the boot of the Audi and a curved metal tool from inside the Seat, both believed to have been brought along for use against Hussain.
Detectives went on to gather more than 200 hours of surveillance footage, evidence from around 40 locations, and more than 300 witness statements, drawing on phone records, emails, and vehicle data as they built their case.
The eight suspects were charged with murder, with manslaughter as an alternative charge, and their trial opened at Leicester Crown Court later that year.
After the case had run for more than six weeks, the judge discharged the jury, citing an irregularity that was purely internal to the jury and unconnected to the conduct of any defendant or the victims’ families. The defendants were released on bail, and a retrial was ordered for the following year.
The retrial opened at Leicester Crown Court in 2023 and concluded on 4 August, when a jury of five men and seven women returned its verdicts after more than 28 hours of deliberation.
Mahek Bukhari, Ansreen Bukhari, Raees Jamal, and Rekan Karwan were found guilty of two counts of murder. Ameer Jamal, Sanaf Gulammustafa, and Natasha Akhtar were found not guilty of murder but guilty of two counts of manslaughter.
Mohammed Patel was cleared of both charges. Mahek Bukhari cried in the dock as the verdicts were read out.
Following the verdicts, the families of the two victims released statements through Leicestershire Police. Hussain’s family described him as “kind, compassionate, caring and sensible,” adding that they were struggling to come to terms with their loss.
Ijazuddin’s family said he had always been willing to help others and that on the night he died, he had simply been giving a friend a lift as a favor.
On 1 September 2023, Judge Timothy Spencer KC sentenced the four defendants convicted of murder to the mandatory term of life imprisonment. He told the court the case was rooted in love, obsession, and extortion, and described it as an act of cold-blooded murder.
He also noted that had Mahek not left university to pursue her online career, she might have graduated with her future ahead of her, rather than facing decades behind bars.
In setting her minimum term, the judge started from a baseline of 30 years, standard for a double murder, then raised it to reflect factors including the weeks of planning involved, her leading role among the group, the use of masks and weapons, and her decision to give police a false phone PIN that caused evidence to be deleted from her device.
He then reduced the term to account for her age, her lack of any prior criminal record, and the absence of an intention to kill. Mahek Bukhari was given a minimum term of 31 years and eight months.
Ansreen Bukhari received a minimum of 26 years and nine months. Karwan received a minimum of 26 years and ten months. Raees Jamal received a minimum of 31 years, later increased after he was separately convicted of rape in an unrelated case.
Gulammustafa and Ameer Jamal were each sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter, and Akhtar was sentenced to 12 years.
Detective Inspector Mark Parish, who led the investigation for Leicestershire Police, said the pursuit and crash amounted to a “callous and cold-blooded attack which ultimately cost two men their lives.”
He pointed out that none of the defendants had stopped to help the two men or called for assistance, even after driving back past the crash site.
A senior prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service added that the case had involved repeated lies from the defendants, which were only uncovered once investigators pieced together evidence from phones, CCTV, and Hussain’s 999 call.
Because of Mahek’s online profile, the case drew heavy coverage across British media and was later the subject of a television documentary.
Mahek Bukhari and several of her co-defendants later sought permission to appeal.
A single judge who reviewed her application identified four possible errors in her original sentence: that too much weight had been placed on her career as a social media influencer, that the background of blackmail and threats from Hussain had been wrongly set aside, that her youth and immaturity had not been properly weighed, and that the balance struck between aggravating and mitigating factors had been unfair.
In October 2025, the Court of Appeal heard full arguments on these points. The judges agreed that her original sentence had given too little weight to her age and immaturity, describing the term as excessive, and reduced her minimum sentence to 26 years and 285 days.
The Court of Appeal also reviewed the manslaughter convictions of Ameer Jamal, Gulammustafa, and Akhtar.
Manslaughter convictions of this kind require proof of an underlying unlawful act, and the appeal judges found an arguable problem with how the jury had been instructed on that point during the original trial.
The court reduced their sentences to 12 years and eight months, 12 years and nine months, and 9 years and eight months respectively, and granted all three the right to a full appeal against their manslaughter convictions.
The minimum terms given to Ansreen Bukhari, Raees Jamal, and Karwan were not altered by the Court of Appeal.
Ansreen Bukhari had also sought to appeal her own conviction but withdrew the application the day before it was due to be heard. Barring a successful appeal, Mahek Bukhari will not be eligible for parole until 2049.
