A pizza shop owner has been convicted of murdering his wife and leaving her body in a woodland grave.

Nezam Salangy, 44, was found guilty at Worcester Crown Court on Tuesday of killing Zobaidah Salangy on 28 March 2020.

He was also found to have buried the body of his wife of eight years in woodland near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, at nighttime.

Salangy’s younger brothers, Mohammed Yasin, 34, and 31-year-old Mohammed Ramin Salangy, who worked in another pizza shop, were also convicted alongside their older brother of assisting an offender, helping him to cover up the crime.

Ramin travelled 90 miles by cab from his and Yasin’s home in Cardiff, Wales, to help bury the victim.

Yasin assisted in the crime by covering up knowledge of the killing and the unmarked burial, with telephone evidence sealing his guilt.

Jurors took 13 hours and 55 minutes to reach a unanimous conviction.

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Salangy later reported his wife missing to police, telling them “she had gone out for a run and never came back”, after leaving him for a “new boyfriend”, prosecutors said.

None of the men initially showed any reaction as the verdicts were read and “unusually”, as Mr Justice Hilliard told the 11-member jury, none had chosen to give evidence at their own trial.

Six months between Zobaidah’s death and her body being found

Opening the Crown’s case, at the start of the six-week trial, Simon Denison QC said it was an “unfortunate fact” of the case Mrs Salangy’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.

He added that due to the “six-and-a-half months between her death and her body being discovered”, it had been impossible to determine the 28-year-old’s exact cause of death.

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.”

However, police were still “convinced she must be there” and returned to the spot in October 2020, and this time “found Zobaidah’s body”.

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