A teenage girl who was dumped by her ‘controlling’ boyfriend committed suicide by deliberately stepping into the path of
traffic on a dark motorway, an inquest heard.Lena Begum, 18, had been wandering around the three lane
carriageway for up to two hours during which she recorded a 3am voice mail message for Quzlam Ahmed saying: ‘You will probably love me one day the way I loved you, but it will be too late.’Minutes later the dental student was killed after walking in front of a van travelling at almost 60mph along the inside lane of the M65 near her home in Burnley, Lancashire.She said Lena would ‘drop everything’ to meet Mr Ahmed whenever he called, and as the relationship developed she went from being ‘happy and fun’ to ‘depressed’.In a statement, she said Lena had told her she would ‘go onto a motorway and get herself run over.’
Miss Alam said: ‘I kept telling her to stop seeing him but she didn’t listen.On the night of the tragedy on April 10 last year, Miss Alam said she and Lena had been at the home of a friend Marcia Khan before heading to a shisha bar, where guests smoke flavoured tobacco in pipes.Afterwards Lena asked to be dropped off on a road near the motorway. Miss Alam said: ‘All I remember is her going up some stairs, she seemed happy. She wasn’t saying about hurting herself, she never said anything.
Miss Khan said during the evening Lena had confided in her about her romance with Ahmed. She said: ‘Lena was saying how he didn’t love her and she just wanted him to love her, thatshe does everything for him and he doesn’t do anything.‘She was being quiet – before that conversation she was happy and bubbly. I’d heard a few things that she had tried doingthings in the past but didn’t believe that she had the ability.’She said at the end of the evening, Lena had, ‘walked up the
stairs, turned around and smiled’. She added: ‘I smiled back.That was the last time I saw her.‘She said she wanted to see her friend, and made it sound so realistic.’But half an hour later Lena was spotted walking down the
motorway slip road and into oncoming traffic, recording messages to loved ones as she held her mobile phone.
Driver Michelle Harris, who was coming off the motorway, said:‘She was not dawdling, not staggering and appeared to be
doing something with her mobile phone, holding it up with bothhands at chest level.
‘I thought she was texting. I slowed and came to a stop and looked in my mirror and couldn’t see her. I thought she could have broken down.’The inquest heard that deliveryman John Trainer, 48, was driving his Mercedes Sprinter van in the inside lane of the motorway at 3.50am when Lena walked in front of him. His statement read: ‘There was no lighting, the area was pitch black. For a split second I caught a glimpse of a person who was walking across from lane two, almost at the line divider.‘I pressed the brakes as hard as I could, I swerved to avoid. She didn’t even look towards me, she just continued to walk across. I couldn’t avoid the collision. ‘I don’t believe I could have done anything to avoid her, I do
believe if there were motorway lights I would have seen her sooner and slowed down a lot sooner.’
Lena was pronounced dead at the scene despite attempts to save her. Records showed she had spoken to Ahmed twice on
the phone for around 30 minutes. At 2.05 am she posted a picture to Facebook and Twitter, and earlier in the evening posted messages on social networking sites.
