A Cardiff man has been sentenced to life in prison after admitting he murdered his estranged wife, buried her body beneath a garden flower bed at their former home and tried to make it look as though she had vanished on her own.
The sentence closed the first major chapter of a murder case that shook Cardiff because of both its planning and its concealment. Alireza Askari, 42, must serve at least 26 years for the killing of Paria Veisi, 37, a businesswoman whose disappearance triggered a citywide search before detectives found her buried in a makeshift grave. The court also sentenced Askari’s aunt, Maryam Delavary, to five years and six months after prosecutors said she helped destroy evidence and cover up the crime.
Veisi was last seen on April 12, 2025, after leaving work in Cardiff. By then, the marriage had broken down and she had recently moved out of the Penylan home she had once shared with Askari. Prosecutors said Askari lured her back to the property that day, armed himself with kitchen knives and killed her inside the house. South Wales Police later said Veisi had been stabbed in the neck and chest. After the killing, prosecutors told Cardiff Crown Court, Askari buried her body in the garden beneath patio slabs, soil and newly planted flowers, turning part of the yard into what the judge later described as a makeshift grave. In the first days after she disappeared, concern rose quickly because relatives and friends said her absence was out of character. Her black Mercedes was later found abandoned in the Penylan area, adding to fears that something had gone badly wrong.
Detectives said Askari then moved into the cover-up phase with unusual calm. According to the sentencing account laid out in court, he cleaned the scene, sent text messages from Veisi’s phone and tried to build a false story that she had chosen to leave Britain. Some of those messages were sent to her family and employer, creating the impression that she had traveled abroad and did not want to be contacted. The deception bought him time, but only briefly. A friend alerted police when Veisi’s disappearance stopped making sense, and officers soon began treating the case as a murder investigation. South Wales Police said Askari and Delavary both lied during the search for Veisi. When officers dug in the garden of the former family home, they found the body detectives had already come to believe would be there. The hidden grave turned a missing-person inquiry into one of the most disturbing domestic homicide cases in Wales in recent years.
The court heard that the killing was not spontaneous. Prosecutors said Askari had been angry over the separation and had planned the attack in advance. Reporting from the sentencing said he bought knives on the day of the murder and later obtained bleach and caustic soda as part of the effort to conceal what he had done. The judge rejected any suggestion that the killing was driven by mental illness in a way that reduced his responsibility. Instead, the court treated it as a deliberate and cold-blooded act carried out after Askari had time to think about what he intended to do. That conclusion was central to the life sentence and the 26-year minimum term. It also shaped the way the case was understood publicly. This was not presented in court as a chaotic argument that spiraled out of control. It was presented as a calculated murder followed by a calculated effort to erase the victim and mislead everyone who loved her.
Delavary’s role, while secondary, became one of the case’s most unsettling features. Prosecutors said she traveled to Cardiff after the killing and helped her nephew deal with the aftermath rather than alert police. She admitted perverting the course of justice. South Wales Police said she colluded in the attempt to cover up Veisi’s death. Her sentence of five years and six months reflected the court’s view that the concealment was serious and active, not passive. Cases involving family members who step in after a killing often turn on exactly what they knew and when they knew it. Here, the guilty plea settled that question in broad terms. Delavary was not accused of carrying out the murder itself, but the court concluded she knowingly helped protect the man who had.
The killing of Veisi resonated far beyond the courtroom because of who she was and how those close to her described her life before it was cut short. Public statements during the case portrayed her as a successful and independent woman with strong ties to family and community. Friends and relatives said she had been trying to move forward after the breakup of her marriage. That context deepened the case’s emotional force. Prosecutors were not only describing a woman who had been killed. They were describing a woman who had already begun separating herself from the man who eventually murdered her. In domestic abuse cases, that stage can be one of the most dangerous. The evidence presented at sentencing suggested resentment over the separation sat at the center of Askari’s motive, even if the final explanation died with him and Veisi inside that house.
The investigation itself followed the pattern of many modern homicide cases, combining witness concern, vehicle tracing, digital evidence and patient forensic work. Police began with a disappearance that did not fit the known facts of Veisi’s life. From there, detectives tracked the abandoned car, examined messages sent after she vanished and compared those messages to the reality of her movements. They also worked backward from the false trail that Askari tried to create. The more that trail was tested, the weaker it looked. Once detectives focused on the Penylan address, the garden became the key. South Wales Police later said the body was found by detectives investigating her disappearance, and that discovery fixed the case around a single grim truth: Veisi had never left voluntarily. She had been killed where she once lived and hidden in the same property’s yard.
At sentencing, the court also heard about the wider harm left behind. Victim impact statements described a family still struggling to understand how a person they loved could be removed so completely and then spoken for by the man who killed her. That detail has lingered in the public mind as much as the burial itself. Askari did not merely hide Veisi’s body, prosecutors said. He tried to control her voice after death, using her phone to create the illusion that she was alive and making choices on her own. That deception transformed the case from a murder alone into an assault on the family’s ability to search, grieve and know the truth. It also helps explain why the judge’s language at sentencing was so severe. The crime did not end with the stabbing. It continued through every lie that followed it.
The legal case is now largely settled. Askari pleaded guilty to murder and preventing a lawful burial, so there will be no trial over who killed Veisi or where her body was found. Delavary also admitted her role in the cover-up. Any future court action is likely to come only through appeals, not through new fact-finding about the killing itself. That leaves the sentence as the clearest public endpoint: a life term for the man who killed Veisi and a prison sentence for the relative who helped him conceal the crime. What remains unresolved is the quieter part of the story, the loss carried by the people who were first told, through false texts, that Veisi had simply gone away.
As of March 20, Askari had been sentenced to life with a minimum term of 26 years, and Delavary had also been jailed for helping cover up the killing. Barring any appeal, the March 13 sentencing hearing marked the final major public court milestone in the case over Veisi’s murder.