A seven-year-old girl was kept prisoner and deliberately starved to death after her mother and partner denied her access to a kitchen stocked with food, a court has heard.

Seven-year-old Khyra was allegedly starved to death

Khyra Ishaq's emaciated body was found by ambulance crews in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, the city's crown court was told.

She had succumbed to an infection following "weeks and weeks" of starvation, it was alleged.

A jury trying Angela Gordon and Junaid Abuhamza heard that Khyra could not enter the kitchen because a lock had been placed on the door.

Gordon and Abuhamza both deny murder.

Prosecutor Timothy Raggatt QC said Khyra had been starved to a point that was almost unique in the experience of British medical staff.

She was so thin when she died on May 17 last year that her Body Mass Index could not be measured on any available chart, he said.

He likened her frame to that seen in photographs of famine victims in Africa.

"The cruelty and maltreatment of that little girl, you may well come to think, was both ultimately calculated and obviously deliberate," Mr Raggatt said.

Khyra and five other children under the couple's control at the terraced home in Leyton Road were denied food and subjected to a sustained regime of punishment, Mr Raggatt said.

Pictures of a fully-stocked fridge, freezer and pantry were shown to the court.

But all lay behind a kitchen door which had been fitted with a lock to "seal off" the kitchen from the children, the just heard.

Jurors heard that Khyra and the five other children, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were occasionally fed porridge, dry bread and fruit.

They would eat with their hands on the floor of the small upstairs room they shared, the court heard.

Flowers at the scene

If they were caught stealing food the children were punished with "detention", made to stand outside in the cold, beaten with a cane, or made to overeat until they were sick, he told the court.

Neighbours heard screams coming from the house in the middle of the night, and cries of "Let me out, let me out" from the property, Mr Raggatt said.

One woman who lived nearby told police she had seen Khyra - dressed in just her underwear - in the back garden of the property in the month before her death.

She told officers it was a cold morning and the child was whimpering, adding: "I couldn't really see any meat on her - it was all bones," Mr Raggatt said.

The prosecutor told jurors that Gordon, 34, and 30-year-old Abuhamza had a duty in law to care for Khyra, but had betrayed that duty in every possible sense.

He said: "The cause of her death was the physical state that she was in. "It's just as much murder... as if they had shot, stabbed, beaten or strangled Khyra to death."

The court heard that Khyra had lived a normal and happy family life while her natural parents - Gordon and her husband Abuzaire Ishaq - were together.

But the marriage failed and, in 2007, Gordon and Abuhamza became a couple, with Abuhamza moving into the Leyton Road property.

Abuhamza, who denies murder, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to child cruelty charges relating to the five other children.

Gordon denies murder and five charges of child cruelty alleged to have been committed between December 2007 and May 17, 2008.

The trial continues.