Dramatic moment heartbroken mum breaks down in court as evil acid bath killer Meraj Zafar is jailed for the murder of pregnant teenage wife Arnima Hayat in North Parramatta, western Sydney

A tradie who murdered his pregnant wife of four months then dumped her body in an acid bath has been jailed for a minimum 16 years.

Meraj Zafar, 23, killed Arnima Hayat, 19 at their North Parramatta apartment in Sydney’s west when she tried to end their turbulent marriage in January 2022. 

Ms Hayat, a medical science student, had wanted to leave Zafar amid what a judge called his ‘controlling and violent behaviour’.

Justice Deborah Sweeney jailed Zafar for a maximum 21 years and six months during a sentencing hearing in the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday.

It was never established precisely how Ms Hayat was murdered but Zafar had taken her life ‘by applying compression to her neck and/or smothering her’ before placing her body in a bath of hydrochloric acid. 

Justice Sweeney said Ms Hayat’s body was so badly decomposed the aspiring doctor could only be indentified through DNA samples.

Her mother Mahafuza Akter broke down in tears of the floor of the court during the sentencing, Nine newspapers reported. 

Ms Hayat’s family migrated to Australia from Bangladesh when she was a child and established a successful butcher shop.

Father Abu Hayat and Ms Akter became citizens and their eldest daughter appeared to have a promising future in medicine until Zafar – her first boyfriend – entered her life.

Ms Hayat was a studying at Western Sydney University when she fell for Zafar, a drug user who had transformed himself from a skinny teenager into a musclebound thug.

Her parents previously told Daily Mail Australia their daughter was a studious but fun-loving ‘Aussie girl’ who ‘loved movies, music, she liked driving and shopping and buying pretty clothes’.

Once in a relationship with Zafar, Ms Hayat went from being a normal, sociable teenager who regularly told her family how much she loved them to being withdrawn.

The pair married in October 2021 but the union had already been marked by violence.

Police took out an apprehended violence order protecting Ms Hayat in May 2021 after an enraged Zafar put his hands around her neck, believing she had been seen with another man.

Zafar had also stalked and threatened Mr Hayat over the phone when he refused to give him permission to marry his teenage daughter.

The apprentice builder had a fiery argument with Mr Hayat after turning up at his home on the evening of October 8, 2021.

Zafar had told Mr Hayat he intended to marry his then-18-year-old daughter with the older man requesting to meet the tradie’s parents first.

When an argument broke out, the young couple went to a Hayat family friend and neighbour’s flat.

About 8.45pm, Mr Hayat started receiving calls from an unknown number.

He answered the fourth call and her daughter’s boyfriend was ‘angry and started abusing’ Mr Hayat ‘and making threats of harm’.

A court heard Zafar said to his girlfriend’s father, ‘Are you a man or are you a lady? Why can’t you make a decision? I want a decision quickly.’

Two hours later, Mr Hayat attended Campsie police station, where officers told him Zafar had admitted abusing the older man over the phone.

From October, 2021 – when Zafar and Ms Hayat moved in together – the family did not even receive phone calls from her.

She had sent a desperate message to a friend on the night of her death.

‘I have nobody except you,’ Ms Hayat wrote to her friend.

He replied: ‘You have got no choice. You have to stay with him.’

In a final message at 9.10pm, Ms Hayat wrote: ‘No, I hate him.’

Within 45 minutes, she had been murdered by her husband who drove to Bunnings in Northmead to buy 100 litres of hydrochloric acid the following day.

Zafar then poured the acid over Ms Hayat’s body in a bathtub ‘in [an] attempt to dispose of her remains’, the facts of the case state.

The facts reveal that Zafar searched on the internet, ‘Can hydrochloric acid burn through skin?’ and, ‘How many years do you get in Sydney for murder?’

Zafar also called his mother and said that he had fought with his wife, and she was not breathing.

She advised him to ring an ambulance but he refused, saying: ‘The police will get me and they will put me in jail.’

‘The offender also asked his mother how much a ticket to go overseas was,’ the facts state.

Zafar’s mother called emergency services to the unit.

When police forced entry into the apartment, they discovered Ms Hayat ‘lying face down with her face hidden and contorted in half’ with ‘a strong chemical odour in the air which was overwhelming’.

NSW Fire and Rescue officers were forced to wear hazmat suits to enter the bathroom, finding only one of Ms Hayat’s feet remaining undestroyed.

Zafar had fled the scene but two days later handed himself into police.

According to the facts, while on the run, Zafar told a friend: ‘I married this girl last year, her parents didn’t like me. I married her to have kids.’

 Last month, Ms Hayat’s father addressed the killer directly in court.

‘You killed my daughter, you broke her future… you broke my family, you broke my heart,’ Mr Hayat told Zafar. ‘We lost our daughter and everything else.’

At the same hearing, Zafar offered an apology to Ms Hayat’s parents without using their daughter’s name, instead referring to her only as ‘my wife’.

Crown prosecutor Fiona Gray had submitted that Zafar’s inability to recognise Ms Hayat’s value outside of her connection to him reflected his ‘possessive and controlling’ conduct throughout their relationship.

Mr Hayat said he had been unable to see his daughter one last time because the hydrochloric acid had destroyed her body.

‘He burned the face I used to talk to every night – he burned her,’ Mr Hayat said. ‘Can you imagine someone burning your child?

‘He burned her, and I can never see her again.’

Ms Hayat’s mother remembered the day her life fell apart in a statement read by a volunteer from the Homicide Victims Support Group.

‘My tears are never ending and the deep ache in my heart never stops – never stops, never stops,’ her statement said.

‘I cry day and night because she was stolen from me.

Weeping as her words were read, Ms Akter described Ms Hayat as a beautiful daughter and dedicated student who would have been a ‘fun-long and wonderful mother’.

‘The dreams we shared for her future were everything a mother could hope for, and losing that dream has left a void that can never be filled,’ Ms Akter had written of her daughter.

‘What happens to her dreams now that she has been murdered, the dreams we built together? Moving to Australia was supposed to be the start of our dreams, not the end.’

Ms Akter said her daughter had been murdered by the person supposed to love her and ‘protect her’ and that she would ‘give anything to see her face one last time’.

‘Instead, I sit by her grave every Friday stroking the grass because I can no longer stroke her hair – I kiss and hug her tombstone, longing to hold her and smell her.’

Ms Hayat had married Zafar in a secret ceremony against her family’s wishes and just four months later was dead.

‘Please come home, Amy,’ her mother begged. ‘Please. I wish I could wake up from this nightmare and see you at home.

‘I don’t know how I ended up in this nightmare and everything went so wrong, but I knew he wasn’t a good man.

‘She was murdered by the person who was meant to love her, murdered by the person who was meant to respect her, by the person meant to protect her, the person meant to father her child and start a family with, by the person who was supposed to make all her dreams come true.

‘She should be home helping me make dinner… and doing her make-up, studying for her end-of-semester exams, having tea and chatting with her father – she should be home.’

Once the grieving mother’s statement was complete, Justice Sweeney told her: ‘Ms Akter, I’m sorry for the loss of your beautiful daughter. You have my sympathy.’

In a letter addressed to the court and his victim’s family, Zafar said he took full responsibility for his actions.

‘I don’t know how to begin to say how sorry I am for all that I have caused and all that I have affected through my actions,’ he wrote in the letter read aloud in court.

‘It’s the most terrible thing to do to someone else.’

The murderer said no one should be treated with violence or ‘discarded’ in the way Ms Hayat had been.

‘I hope one day you can forgive me,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry.’

Zafar will be eligible for parole in March 2038.