Determined to leave Syria when civil war broke out, Khaled first paid for the oldest of his eight children to be smuggled across Europe into Holland. 

When the 15-year-old was duly granted asylum there, he, his wife and the rest of the Al Najjar family successfully applied to join him. And the warm welcome from the Dutch authorities did not end there.

The local council in the northern town of Joure had a seven-room unit for the disabled, specially converted so the large family could be together. Furniture was supplied, as were school places, language classes, and benefits.

In the years that followed, Khaled would be helped to open a pizza shop and a courier firm.

Back in 2017, the story of this 'model' refugee family even appeared in a local newspaper. Photos showed them enjoying the new accommodation.

One picture featured their daughter Ryan, then aged 11 and wearing a headscarf, smiling broadly beneath a verse in Arabic from the Koran which had been chalked on a blackboard.

Eldest son Muhanad, meanwhile, praised the 'kindness' of locals and spoke of his hopes that they, as Muslims, would fully integrate into the local community.

'Give us the opportunity to get to know each other,' he pleaded.

Well, eight years on, and what we now know about the Al Najjar family is as shocking as it is desperately sad. Because Ryan, that little girl, is dead.

Days after her 18th birthday, her body was found lying face down in a small stream in a remote Dutch nature park. Gagged and with her hands tied behind her back, in total 18 metres of tape had been used to bind her body.

Prosecutors said there appeared to be evidence that she had been 'suffocated or strangled' but that the cause of death in May 2024 was drowning. In other words, she had been thrown into the water while still alive.

Yesterday, Ryan's brothers Muhanad, now 25, Mohamed, 23, and her father Khaled were all found guilty of murdering her in a so-called honour killing. The brothers were sentenced to 20 years in prison, their father to 30.

Delivering the verdicts to a packed courtroom in Lelystad, Judge Miranda Loots said: 'It is the task of a parent to support their child and allow them to flourish. Khaled did the opposite.'

Ryan's 'crime'? She had become too westernised. As a teenager, she stopped covering her hair and began hanging out with girls and boys from different backgrounds and using social media.

Pictures seen by the Daily Mail show her dressed in jeans, trainers, and a hoodie. Happy and smiling, in one shot, she makes a peace sign to the camera.

While the authorities had been involved in trying to protect Ryan in the years before her death, she never quite escaped the grasp of her highly conservative family. But, having turned 18, she made it clear she wanted nothing more to do with them. And so they decided to kill her.

As the Dutch public prosecutor observed, to them she was just a 'burden' that needed to be eliminated – a 'pig' that had to be 'slaughtered'.

'A snake would be a better daughter,' her father raged in a string of messages sent on a family WhatsApp group.

Another relative wrote: 'May God let her be killed by a train, I spit on her. She's tarnished our reputation.' A third message sent from her mother's phone read: 'She is a slut and should be killed.'

And so it was that Ryan was abducted, bound and brutalised, and her body dumped in a watery grave.

Khaled, the violent, controlling patriarch of the family, turned out to be a coward, too.

After killing his daughter, the 53-year-old travelled to Turkey and then, irony of ironies, scuttled back to Syria – the country he had previously fled from and where he remains on the run. He was tried and sentenced in his absence.

Although Khaled subsequently claimed in emails sent to a Dutch newspaper to be the only person responsible for Ryan's death, investigators established that his two eldest sons were also present. 

Whether or not Khaled will ever face justice depends on whether he can be extradited from Syria. The Dutch authorities say that the absence of an extradition treaty and lack of established diplomatic ties mean this cannot yet happen. 

However, Syria's Ministry of Justice disputes this, saying that the government has never received a request from the Netherlands regarding this case.

The Daily Mail has established that Khaled is now living in the north-west of Syria, where he has begun a new life. He has had contact with relatives there, showing little remorse.

'He is married and has started a family,' one of Ryan's sisters, Iman, 27, told the Daily Mail. 'Is this the justice the Netherlands is talking about? We demand that the Dutch authorities and all parties involved arrest him, because he is a murderer.'

She added: 'My father was difficult to live with because he wanted everything to be as he said, even if it was wrong.

'Tension and fear hung over the house because of him. He was very unfair and temperamental towards my siblings, and he hit and threatened me. Once, my father hit Ryan, after which she went to school and never came home. She was taken into the care of a child protection organisation.

'Since then, there has been constant tension and sadness in the house because a family member is no longer there – the family is no longer whole, and that is very sad.'

What is equally sad is that the problem of 'honour-based' violence is far from rare in Holland – each year, police see up to 3,000 offences in which it is involved. Of these, somewhere between seven and 17 incidents end with fatalities, be that murder, manslaughter, or suicide. In the case of Ryan, the first sign that something was wrong came in 2021 when the authorities discovered the 15-year-old was carrying a knife with her on the way to school, and was threatening to kill herself, so unhappy was she with her home life.

Two years later, in February 2023, matters came to a head when she appeared, barefoot, at a neighbour's house, telling them: 'You have to help me, you have to help me. My father wants to kill me.' According to the neighbour, the girl said she had been locked up by her father because she was seeing a boy.

She said: 'And her father didn't approve. She fled through the window. She probably saw the lights on at our house.'

From 2021 to her 18th birthday in May 2024, the teenager was in and out of various care homes and had also been placed under strict government-backed security.

But for reasons which the Dutch authorities have refused to explain, Ryan left the scheme around the time of her death.

'She stayed in open institutions and then would often return to her family,' a spokesperson for the Netherlands Control Centre for Protection and Safety told the Daily Mail, adding that this presented staff with a 'dilemma'.

'We did everything we could to protect Ryan, and we tried to avert danger by collaborating with adult services so she would be protected after she turned 18.'

That birthday was clearly a significant turning point. A photo shows her celebrating on social media, complete with balloons.

Around the same time, she did a live video on TikTok, without a headscarf and wearing make-up. In it, she shared her name and the names of her family members and urged authorities to 'remove the children' from her parents' care.

A subsequent message to a younger brother read: 'I am never coming back. It's over, my way of thinking and yours clash, it's very difficult to understand each other.'

Enraged, her father fired off messages to the family WhatsApp group saying that they now had 'no choice'. In one, he said that 'under sharia law' he was permitted to kill his daughter, and asked family members for suggestions.

A 'suicide pill from Turkey' was one of the proposals, along with poison or encouraging her to commit suicide. Determined to act, Khaled instructed his two sons to find Ryan and then 'throw her in a lake and let the fish eat her'.

The brothers drove to Rotterdam, where Ryan was staying with a male friend. Fearing for her life, she grabbed a knife and locked herself in a bedroom.

But they persuaded her to come out and return home to 'apologise' to her father. It was a decision that cost her her life.

Investigators traced the route the car took from Rotterdam to an isolated nature park near Lelystad using roadside cameras and mobile phone data.

They also traced Khaled's movements – first to a hardware store and then leaving his house at 11.31pm on May 27, 2024.

Less than an hour later, he met his sons as they waited in a lay-by with Ryan.

The brothers' version of events was that Khaled walked off into the reserve with Ryan 'to talk'. They claimed that minutes later, he reappeared alone, saying their sister had 'run away' after he hit her, and there was nothing they could do but go home.

However, data recovered from the brothers' mobile phones showed that while at the scene, one had 'descended' six metres, the exact fall from the road to the path that led into the woods. It also recorded how his 220-step count was exactly the same as Ryan's – but whereas her phone only recorded a one-way trip, his showed a return of the same distance.

In court, when asked why they hadn't phoned Ryan or gone into the woods to look for her, the brothers claimed she had blocked their numbers. They added they were also in fear of their father and so left when he told them to, arriving home just after 2am.

A park ranger discovered Ryan's lifeless body the following morning and raised the alarm.

Khaled instructed his sons to delete any incriminating messages before leaving the country. He flew from Bremen in Germany to Turkey and then on to Syria. In the police investigation, wiretap interceptions incriminated the brothers, while Khaled incriminated himself.

'I got stressed from hearing stories about her, I strangled her and threw her into the river,' he said in a message sent to his wife.

Another message from him to the family group chat, sent a week after Ryan's body was discovered, was also read in court.

In it he wrote: 'What happened? I just read in the media you two were arrested. I killed her in a fit of rage. I threw her into the river. I thought it would blow over.'

Callously, he added: 'My big mistake was not digging a hole for her but I just couldn't. I went to Turkey to get my teeth cleaned but I will be back, the courts in Holland are fair.'

Two Dutch newspapers were also able to contact Khaled in Syria via email, prompting him to 'confess' to the killing while claiming his sons were innocent.

In the message to the Leeuwarder Courant, written in Arabic, he said: 'I am the one who killed her, and no one helped me.'

In a later email, he claimed he had 'no choice but to kill her', adding it was due to her behaviour as it was 'not in line with my customs, traditions and religion'.

Prosecutors concluded that Ryan was killed by Khaled or by him with the brothers. In his summing up, Bart Niks said: 'What is important is that all three men were there together. Without them, she would never have been on that dark path. They planned it and agreed to it. It was the father who took the initiative, but the brothers also deserve heavy sentences.'

Earlier, Mr Niks had told the court: 'There is no place for this form of violence in the Netherlands... Ryan came to the Netherlands for safety, but she was never safe. She had death threats and abuse from her father, mother, and brothers.

'Once she went to the authorities, as far as they were concerned, the family honour was gone, and so she was murdered by her own father and brothers. She was reduced to an animal... A young woman at the beginning of her life was gone.'

In court, overseen by a panel of three judges, lawyers for the two brothers argued there was no forensic evidence linking them to their sister's murder. Khaled's lawyer, Ersen Albayrak, said his client admitted his part in the killing but said it was 'on impulse and not planned and so not murder but manslaughter'.

Speaking to the Daily Mail last week, Johan Muhren, Muhanad's lawyer, appealed for Khaled to return to Holland to face justice. 'Testifying would be the most honourable thing for him to do,' he said.

Khaled is believed to have returned to the area around the Syrian city of Idlib, not far from Taftanaz, where the family lived until 2012 when war broke out. They first fled to Turkey before paying people-smugglers £3,250 to transport their son to Holland in about 2015.

While Khaled's Syrian relatives declined to talk to the Daily Mail, one of Ryan's uncles previously told Dutch TV: 'She [Ryan] was normal, she read the Koran . . . But in the Netherlands, she became different. The schools there are mixed. She saw women without headscarves, she saw women smoking. So she was also going to behave like that, and it happened. But surely that can't lead to her death?'

Sadly, the world now knows the answer to that question. And while Khaled may have escaped justice for now, he will never be free of the crime he committed – the most dishonourable, despicable death of his beautiful, innocent daughter.