The mother of an autistic five-year-old boy who died after plunging 15 floors from his family’s flat told an inquest her son would still be alive if the council had ‘done their job’.
Aalim Ahmed died after falling from a kitchen window onto a railing at the bottom of his family’s apartment block in Plaistow, in the east of the country. Londonon May 16, 2024.
The boy’s body was discovered by his father a short time later.
At an inquest into Aalim’s death at Walthamstow Coroner’s Court on Monday, his mother Sahra Osman said she was ‘scared’ and ‘shocked’ when Newham Council allocated her the flat on the top floor of the Jacobs House block.
The family, which also included Aalim, another toddler and Ms Osman’s partner, deemed the home unsuitable from the moment they moved in in February 2023.
Ms Osman, who was pregnant at the time, says she was advised by Newham Council to take the flat and make a formal complaint about her safety concerns rather than risk homelessness.
The mother speculated that her five-year-old might have climbed to the window to grab a cookie just before he fell to the floor. She added that Aalim had been diagnosed with autism and had “no sense of danger.”
The windows in the flat, she says, had ‘faulty restrictors’, but her attempts to fix them only led to a series of workmen visiting and failing to solve the problem.
Aalim Ahmed died in May 2024 at the age of five after falling from the top floor of his family’s flat in Plaistow, east London.
The boy’s body was discovered a short time later by his father outside the Jacobs House apartment building
“As a mother, I did everything I could to help my son,” an emotional Mrs Osman told council representative Sandesh Singh at the inquest on Monday.
Aalim’s body was identified by his family and his cause of death was listed as multiple injuries due to trauma from a ‘fall from height’, the inquest previously heard.
Mrs Osman continued: ‘You could have prevented this tragic event. If you had done your job, he could have been here.
‘I think Newham Council has failed me as a mother and as a tenant. I’ve tried everything. I have tried several times to raise my safety concerns, but you ignored me instead of addressing the actual issues.
“I told you that my son (Aalim) has autism. I don’t know what else I can prove. I showed you a doctor’s letter. The people who knew him sent a letter to the council saying that this family needs to be moved from this flat because they are not safe.”
The court heard she had sent an email telling her about Aalim’s autism diagnosis, and Ms Osman said she also ‘believes’ she had sent a letter about it.
Engineers visited the flat to look at repairs, but Ms Osman felt her home was still unsafe because it had ‘open windows’.
All windows were “always closed” before the family went to bed, but the screams of her toddler shouting “Aalim,” “window” and “outside” later alerted the family that something was very wrong.
Ms Osman said her partner stood at the kitchen window and ‘just cried and screamed in shock’ when ‘he saw his son’s pajamas’ and ‘he just couldn’t believe it’.
Aalim’s father Makail Ahmed told the court the moment was one of “disbelief – it was a nightmare.”
He discovered his son’s body after sprinting to the ground floor. Neighbors who woke up called 999.
Previously, Ms Osman said that when a window engineer came in January 2024, she tried “all the windows” in the flat and could still open them.
She wanted a safety feature, called a restrictor, on all windows and noted that the bedroom window could “just be left wide open”, saying: “I was quite scared and it was unsafe”.
The technician said he would try to fix it, but within a day she had found a window stay on the floor.
She called the council to complain and begged them to help. She told the inquest: ‘The window was wide open, it didn’t lock, it was hanging,’ and that she wanted to speak to a manager.
She stressed it was a safety issue for her children, but said the council did not consider it an “emergency.”
Ms Osman added that the ‘restrictors did not work, they were there for decoration’ and she was frustrated that it could take months before she got a good response from the council.
The council suggested that the engineer had not been informed of any problems with the restrictor in the kitchen, but that there were problems in the living room.
However, Ms Osman insisted she had told workers there was a problem in all rooms of the flat and accused the council of ‘not taking my situation seriously enough’.
She told Mr Singh: ‘If you were serious about your work and did what you were supposed to do, my son could have been here. It was preventable.
“If the city had done its job, my son could have been here.”
She denied any suggestion that she had ‘forced’ the window open to cope with the hot weather.
In opening comments, Assistant Coroner Ian Wade said: ‘One of the things I keep in mind is the terrible loss that Aalim’s family and indeed the community has borne.
“I am very aware that this should never have happened, but how it happened remains to be seen.”
The hearing continues.
