A mother who beat her seven-year-old son to death when he failed to memorise passages from the Koran has been jailed for life, for a minimum of 17 years.

The judge told Sara Ege, 33, she subjected Yaseen Ege to prolonged cruelty and a ferocious beating at home in Pontcanna, Cardiff, in July 2010.

She also set fire to his body, and was convicted after a five-week trial.

Mr Justice Wyn Williams said: "I am satisfied that it was his failure to learn the Koran that day that resulted in the beating that caused his death."

He continued: "On the day of Yaseen's death you had kept him home from school so he could devote himself to his study of the Koran.

"He was memorising passages but on that day Yaseen must have failed in some way and it was that which was a trigger for the beating.

"The violence Yaseen suffered was not confined to the day of his death.

"For three months you beat him often with a wooden pestle and I'm confident these beatings left him in a significant amount of pain.

Sara Ege described how Yaseen collapsed after she had beaten him while still murmuring extracts of the Koran.

"I was getting very wild and I hit Yaseen with a stick on his back like a dog"

"He was breathing as if he was asleep when I left him," she said. "He was still murmuring the same thing over and over again. I thought that he was just tired."

When she returned 10 minutes later she said she found her son shaking and shivering on the floor. He then died.

She then used barbecue gel to burn her son's body in an attempt to hide the evidence.