IT started as a missing person investigation.

Mother-of-six Zainab Begum had simply vanished from her home, sending her worried daughters to the police for help.

Family members made and distributed posters appealing for information to help trace her and put them up around the town.

And daughter Samina Amin even sought the support of Hyndburn MP Greg Pope to see if anything more could be done to trace her mum.

Her family reported her missing from her home in Burnley Road, Accrington, on Tuesday, January 13.

And for almost two weeks there was no news. At the time of Mrs Begum's disappearance, Samina, of Queens Road West, Accrington, said: "We are beside ourselves with worry and can't sleep. Her youngest daughter Neelam Sher is only 14. She bursts into tears when we even mention it and can't face school.

"We are desperate for news. It is totally out of character for her to do this. She was a lovely, calm, timid lady. I am going out of my mind.

"Things just don't add up."

After she had been missing for two weeks, and with no confirmed sightings of her since the day she disappeared, her six daughters started losing hope of ever seeing her alive again.

Mrs Amin said: "It sounds horrible to say but she's probably dead because if she could make her way to a phone, she would have done by now.

"When my mum had been missing a week I prepared myself for the worst.

"I was trying to shield my younger sisters from that, but by day seven I had to tell them I didn't think we were going to find her. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life."

Those fears were confirmed when traces of Mrs Begum's blood were found at her Accrington home by investigating officers. Suddenly, the missing person inquiry had turned into a murder investigation.

In the coming weeks a family which had lost its mother was forced to endure more horrors as Muhammed Arshad and his brother Mohammed Sharif Khan - husbands of two Begum daughters - were arrested in connection with her disappearance.

And it would also transpire that a poster appealing for information about the daughters' missing mum had been put up in the same takeaway where her body had been brutally carved up by the killer.

Senior investigating officer Detective Inspector Jim Elston said he first suspected he was dealing with a murder investigation, rather than searching for a missing person, when the first traces of blood were found at Mrs Begum's home.

Det Insp Elston said: "The main turning point was when we undertook a systematic search of the Burnley Road house and found what appeared to be blood. It was at that stage we began to have suspicions, but we kept an open mind.

"At that point forensics took control of the home with the full co-operation of the family. They undertook luminal testing - a chemical which reacts with enzymes in blood causing it to turn fluorescent - and found more blood. We realised at that point Zainab had been seriously injured and was likely dead."

The most striking piece of evidence was Arshad's hand print made in Zainab Begum's blood found at her Accrington home in the days following her disappearance.

Blood was also found around the bed and on the duvet in daughter Zarina's bedroom and in the bathroom they found blood around the sink and on a cleaning rag, indicating a clean-up had taken place.

Using DNA extracted from Mrs Begum's toothbrush police were able to make a match - and prove the chance of the blood belonging to anyone else was less than one billion to one.

Forensic searches were also made at the Millennium takeaway and Arshad and Khan's home in Crumpsall, Manchester.

And at the beginning of February Arshad was charged with Mrs Begum's murder and Khan with assisting in the disposal of her body.

To strengthen the case against Arshad police called war grave expert, Sue Black, a forensic anthropologist who specialises in the decomposition of bodies in different conditions, to help them disprove Arshad's claims of how he dismembered and melted the body using caustic soda.

She found it was extremely unlikely he would have been able to do this in the timescale and with the tools he suggested. And that told the jurors Arshad hjad not used ordinary household chemicals in a moment of panic - he had planned and thought out the brutal disposal of his own mother in law.