The fictional kingdom of couple who buried son in garden

For two years the body of three-year-old Abiyah Yasharahyalah lay underground in the back garden of a terraced house in Birmingham.

The little boy was buried by his parents, who believed he would be reincarnated if they followed a ritual while interring the body. Tai and Naiyahmi Yasharahyalah would later claim that in performing the ceremony, they were trying to preserve their son's soul.

Abiyah died in 2020 following a respiratory infection. This was not the full extent of his poor health. He was in a severely malnourished state and suffered with a list of other problems. Only when his body was exhumed by police in 2022 did the scale of his parents' neglect emerge.

The couple lived off grid and created their own bespoke belief system based on a mixture of elements that drew from New Age mysticism and West African religion. They practised strict veganism and, as they had done with wider society, turned their back on Western medicine.

The lifestyle saw Tai Yasharahyalah style himself as the head of a fictional country for which the couple made their own passports.

But at a criminal trial, a jury heard they prioritised extreme values over Abiyah's welfare, with disastrous consequences.

One detective told the BBC the couple had "spiralled downwards" into a belief system that drove them "into the ground".

Tests on the body showed Abiyah was suffering from a catalogue of conditions including rickets, anaemia, stunted growth, bone malformation and deformity, bone fractures and severe dental decay.

While no cause of death was formally established, experts in court said starvation was probably to blame.

The couple denied causing or allowing Abiyah's death, and also child cruelty by failing to provide adequate nourishment or summon medical care. They were convicted after a seven-week trial at Coventry Crown Court.

Neighbours and relatives had repeatedly raised concerns about Abiyah but his parents became aggressive when challenged.

On the front door of their home in Handsworth was a large sign that read "no trespassing, access denied to all government bodies".

The couple claimed to have renounced their citizenship and did not consider themselves to be "contracted" to the state - in other words, they had withdrawn from society.

Tai Yasharahyalah, a former medical genetics student before quitting the field, invented his own laws and claimed to have established his own kingdom. The couple styled themselves as “sovereign and indigenous members of the Kingdom of Yasharahyalah".

The cult had no other followers. It was just husband and wife; the latter of whom, according to police, was a devotee of her partner's ideology.

The pair, though, were at times not shy to share their views, letting police know a cornerstone of their philosophy.

When officers visited in 2021 to carry out a welfare check on Abiyah, 42-year-old Tai Yasharahyalah yelled out: "You have no jurisdiction in my realm... I don't have to engage with you because I am in my sovereign capacity."

As he spoke, Abiyah was already dead and the police left without finding his makeshift grave.

West Midlands Police has since said an "unfortunate set of circumstances" unfolded, with opportunities missed to intervene. A mix-up led officers to believe that Abiyah was legitimately absent from the property and in the care system.

A Child Safeguarding Practice Review is under way to look at the involvement of police and other agencies in the case.

Det Insp Joe Davenport from the force said: "It’s incredibly harrowing to think of the medical evidence that we’ve heard at court, to think about how much pain Abiyah would have been in, and my heart goes out to Abiyah and the fact that there was opportunities to save him and he wasn’t saved.”

By the time the couple were arrested in December 2022, Abiyah had been dead two years.

The pair had moved to Somerset and were living with another young child in a caravan. Conditions were squalid. The home was cold, dirty, cramped and had a foul stench of urine. There was no toilet - they used buckets instead.

It was there - more than 100 miles away from Abiyah's makeshift grave - that a visiting social worker began to sense there was a terrible secret in the couple's recent past.

And in exchanges that went on over the course of three days, a major disclosure was made about Abiyah's fate.

The unravelling began when the social worker examined the couple's social media accounts, with videos discovered from 2016 in which Tai Yasharahyalah could be heard referring to a child called Abiyah.

Naiyahmi Yasharahyalah, 43, was confronted about further images and video from October and December 2018 but she disengaged from conversation with authorities and refused to answer any questions.

The following day, 8 December 2022, the same social worker spoke to Tai Yasharahyalah and asked him about posts that featured images of him with a young child, which had captions including "like father like son".

It was then that he stated the child living with the couple in the caravan was Abiyah reincarnated, and that Abiyah was dead "in a physical sense".

Those words led to the couple's arrests and soon after, Abiyah's body was discovered at the Birmingham property.

Naiyahmi Yasharahyalah was heard shouting to officers when they came to detain her: "I am not contracted to you, I renounce my citizenship."

The mother was described as "skeletal" and had difficultly moving. Her husband was weak too.

"They were in incredibly poor health themselves, which just shows they had continued to spiral downwards into this belief system, which was just driving them into the ground," Det Insp Davenport said.

"They lived completely separate to anyone who wasn’t a believer of their set of values and also as part of that they were strict vegans, and would only eat vegan food, as was the case for Abiyah as well, which has obviously led to his poor health.

"So, it’s just a very sad set of circumstances to think how he would’ve been in his final days at the point of his death."

Naiyahmi Yasharahyalah described herself as being her husband's first disciple and had become completely enamoured by him, the court heard.

He was seen in YouTube videos preaching around Birmingham city centre.

"She completely subscribed to his beliefs system," Det Insp Davenport explained. "She said that she knew he was the love of her life the moment she met him."

Tai Yasharahyalah was studying medical genetics at university when, because of online conspiracy theories, he rejected modern medicine.

In his evidence to the court, he said that with hindsight "I am completely ashamed", and admitted he had been foolish to believe the theories.

"I felt overly protective. I thought I was doing the best for myself and my family," he told the jury.

But police said he was arrogant and manipulative, while Naiyahmi Yasharahyalah was weak-minded and gullible.

"She has followed him willingly and has gone along with his ideology to the detriment of her own health and the health of her child," Det Insp Davenport said.

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