An inquest into the deaths of four members of the El-Khawas family has opened at Horsham after last month’s sea incident at Shoreham-by-Sea. The case covers Hussam El-Khawas, Zeina Alayan, Sara El-Khawas and six-year-old Saja El-Khawas, and the hearing has already been adjourned until 16 March next year.
The hearing matters now because the family’s final hours have only just entered the formal record, even though Sussex Police says its investigation remains open. Saja El-Khawas died in hospital on 21 August after being rescued from the sea off West Sussex, while the official causes of death for Hussam, Alayan and Sara have not yet been established.
The court heard that lifeboats were launched after emergency services received reports of members of the public getting into trouble in the sea. Police, paramedics, coastguard crews and a lifeboat team attended the scene, where the father, mother and older daughter were brought ashore at Kingston Beach by the RNLI and declared deceased at the lifeboat station. Saja was initially taken to the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital in Brighton in a critical state before being transferred to the Evelina Children’s Hospital at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
Kelly Truss told the hearing that all clinical signs throughout Saja’s admission showed evidence of a hypoxic brain injury. She had been pronounced dead on 21 August with a provisional cause of death of 1a hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy and 1b drowning. That level of detail has not yet been reached for the others, and the reasons the family entered the water near Shoreham Fort at around 2pm have not been set out in the open evidence.
What is already known is that Sussex Police, after reviewing CCTV footage and initial witness statements, currently believes the deaths were an accident with no third-party involvement. That view sits alongside an unfinished coroner’s process and an open police inquiry, a combination that leaves the legal cause of the four deaths still divided between what investigators think happened and what the court has yet to establish.
Penelope Schofield said the inquests will be brought forward once the police investigation is complete and offered condolences to the wider family. For now, the next milestone is procedural rather than explanatory: the adjourned inquests are due to resume on 16 March next year unless the investigation moves sooner, and the unanswered question is not whether the deaths are being treated as accidental, but why four members of one family were in difficulty in the water together that afternoon.
