THE wife of an Accrington kebab shop boss told a court how she went on a shopping trip for tools that would be used to chop up her mother just days later.

And Kalsoom Begum revealed she was six months pregnant when she discovered her husband had murdered her mother and cut up her body.

Muhummed Arshad is accused of dismembering the body of mother-in-law Zeinab Begum then storing the parts in the kitchen of Millennium takeaway in Church Street, Accrington. Hw denies murder.

His now ex-wife, Kalsoom Begum, told the Preston Crown Court jury how just days before her mother's disappearance her husband had taken her on a shopping trip for the tools he would use to chop her up. She said the 37-year-old former chef told her he needed the cleaver-style tools to strip meat from lamb carcasses to make a traditional Pakistani dish at the takeaway, which he ran with his brother. Police later found the brush hook and slater's tool wrapped in a butcher's apron and hidden in the takeaway boiler room, the court was told. Arshad's brother, 37-year-old Mohammed Sharif Khan - known as Shazad - who was also married to one of Mrs Begum's daughters, is charged with assisting in the disposal of the body parts.

Kalsoom, a former administrator at Burnley General Hospital and the eldest of 56-year-old Mrs Begum's six daughters, sobbed as she told the court the last time she saw her mother, the day before she died, they had attended a hospital appointment for a scan of her first child.

She said life would never be the same for the family. "She was lovely, really religious, kind and caring. She was our mother, our father, our world. We have nothing now, we really have nothing. It will never be the same again. She was our whole world," she said.

She told the court how Arshad, who she had married in Pakistan in 2001 in an arranged marriage, was a money-hungry workaholic enthralled by dangerous weapons.

"I thought it was strange to keep stuff like that the tools in the bedroom. He likes things like that - scary weapons and tools. I wasn't scared - how can you be suspicious of something like that? He was my husband and I trusted him."

The court had earlier heard how despite exhaustive searches of Arshad's home in Crumpsall, Manchester, and the Accrington takeaway, Mrs Begum's body has never been found.

But forensic officers did find Arshad's handprint in her blood in the bathroom of her home in Burnley Road, Accrington. They also found traces of her blood alongside Arshad's semen on her 20-year-old daughter Zarina's bedclothes.

Arshad, who also worked at Holland's Pies meat processing factory in Baxenden, was arrested on January 28, two weeks after Mrs Begum's disappearance.

Prosecutor David Turner said Arshad refused to answer officers' questions during five interviews, but on the sixth he said Mrs Begum had died in a freak accident after making sexual advances towards him.

He said as he pushed her away she banged her head on a wall and died. He admitted chopping up her body and, together with his brother, dumping her remains in bins behind Indian takeaways in Rusholme, Manchester. But the prosecution said this was an "untrue and unlikely."

(Proceeding)