The family of a mum-of-six killed by a runaway car have reacted angrily to the sentence given to the car's owner.

Kurdish asylum seeker Arben Emini was fined £400 and banned from driving for a year after his car ploughed into Raqia Begum when he failed to pull the handbrake on properly.

Today, the family said they had been given a "life sentence of grief" after his car rolled down a hill as he went into a shop for some sweets and killed Mrs Begum.

The 53-year-old mother was crushed between the front of the car and a wall in Great Horton Road as she walked along the pavement with her eight-year-old daughter Sonenna in September last year.

At Bradford Magistrates yesterday Emini, 22, was fined £400 and ordered to pay £450 costs and banned for a year.

Speaking on behalf of the family, Anila Hussain, Mrs Begum's niece, said they were stunned and disappointed by the sentence.

Miss Hussain, 28, said: "The children are scarred for life by the loss of their mother and the result doesn't reflect that.

"It's a life sentence for us all but particularly for the children.

"Although it wasn't a deliberate act it was an act of carelessness that resulted in the loss of a treasured life."

Mrs Begum had been on her way to collect two of her other children from nearby Farnham Primary School when the tragedy happened at about 3pm on September 29 last year.

Emini, a Kurdish asylum seeker, had parked his Vauxhall Vectra on double yellow lines while he called at a shop to buy sweets for his two-year-old nephew who was strapped into a child seat, prosecutor Graham Anderson told Bradford Magistrates Court.

While he was inside the shop, the car began rolling down the 1 in 17 gradient at about 8 mph.

It mounted the pavement, missing a parked van before ploughing into Mrs Begum, dragging her along and then trapping her between the nearside front wheel and a wall.

An inquest in April heard how Mrs Begum suffered a broken neck and was later pronounced dead at Bradford Royal Infirmary.

Mr Anderson said the little girl had managed to jump out of the way, but her mother suffered fatal injuries.

Miss Hussain who, with her mother, is currently caring for the youngest children, said: "Sonenna is still traumatised by the day she saw her mother die and often wakes up in the night crying."

Emini, of Nene Street, Canterbury, Bradford, pleaded guilty to parking in a prohibited area but denied leaving the car in circumstances involving danger of injury.

He told the court he had set the handbrake and switched on the hazard warning lights before leaving the car.

Defence solicitor Ian Hudson said that if the handbrake had not been properly set, the car would have started rolling immediately his client got out, and there was a real possibility that there had been interference from a third party.

The handbrake had been found to be in perfect working order.

Emini was convicted of the second offence of leaving the car in circumstances involving danger of injury after district judge David Thomas said the "inescapable conclusion" was that the handbrake had not been properly set, in what he described as "a momentary lapse" on Emini's part.

The car should not have been parked there in the first place and there was "absolutely no evidence whatsoever" of third party interference, said Mr Thomas, who extended his condolences to the dead woman's family.

Mr Anderson told the court that the incident had had "devastating consequences" for the family and the little girl had been "traumatised" by seeing her mother killed.

Speaking from Pakistan Mrs Begum's husband of 37 years, Medhi Tufzal, 55, who has recently re-married, said he was still devastated by the death of his "very special" first wife.

But he added: "I am pleased the court case is over. What will be will be. Nothing could have brought back my wife."