UK NEWS

CALL ME LADY, SAYS MURDER CASE WIDOW

Jamila M'Barek with late husband Lord Shaftesbury

Tuesday May 22,2007

By Nick Fagge in Nice

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The widow of murdered British peer Lord Shaftesbury is demanding to be referred to by her formal aristocratic title when she appears in court today, accused of ordering his killing.

Jamila M’Barek, 45, Lord Shaftesbury’s third wife, wants to be called Lady Jamila Shaftesbury. The former nightclub hostess fears her Arab ancestry will alienate the jury, because of old-established tension between Arabs and the French whites.

She also believes she is still entitled to a share of her husband’s £6million fortune, and vast property portfolio, including a 9,000-acre estate at Wimborne, Dorset.

The 11th-hour demand by her lawyers is bound to compound the distress of the family of the Earl, also known as Anthony Ashley-Cooper. A legal source said: “It does not seem right that a woman who was there when Anthony was strangled to death, and then helped hide his body in the back of his car, should be referred to as Lady Shaftesbury.”

Jamila is alleged to have paid her brother Mohammed M’Barek £100,000 to strangle the 66-year-old peer, then helped him load the body into the back of his car to be dumped in a remote Alpine ravine.

The peer’s son, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, 27-year-old 12th Earl, is among those expected to be in the public gallery, with the peer’s sister Frances Ashley-Cooper, who lives near Nice.

The M’Bareks, French Moroccans who were brought up in Tunisia, are in custody and face life imprisonment.

Mohammed, 43, has already confessed to strangling Shaftesbury “accidentally”, after a drunken argument in Cannes, in 2004. But Jamila denies conspiracy to murder. Her lawyer, Franck De Vita, said last night: “I am convinced Jamila will walk free.”