Unborn twins killer sent to jail

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A woman who accidentally killed her unborn twins then blamed a midwife has been convicted in her absence at Bristol Crown Court.

Faiso Sahil, 35, of Ullswater Road, Southmead, injected herself with drugs to bring on the birth of her babies to prevent them being taken into care.

She was found guilty of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to 14 months in prison.

She was given three and a half years on a separate child cruelty charge.

Sahil is currently believed to be in Finland with her family.

Lethal injection

The two sentences are to run consecutively and Sahil is expected to be brought back to the UK.

She had trained as a midwife in her native Somalia and thought the drug Syntometrine - found in a trolley in her delivery suite at Southmead Hospital - would induce her labour.

A similar drug was used in Somalia and in the UK for this purpose, the court heard.

But her twin boy and girl died within 20 to 60 minutes of the injection, which caused the blood supply to her placenta to be restricted, thereby cutting off the oxygen to her babies.

Child slave

She then told consultant Simon Grant that her midwife Caroline Randall had given her the drugs during the night before the twins died, leading to Mrs Randall's arrest and suspension.

Bristol Crown Court also heard that she regularly used weapons to beat a nine-year-old girl in her care and used her as a slave.

The girl, who was forced to do household tasks and slept on the floor, was covered in scars which one doctor described as being the worst she had seen in 10 years of medicine.

She was scratched with a fork, throttled, hit with a rolling pin and bitten by Sahil.