The family of a young mother left dying in the street with her right hand cut off yesterday told how she had lived in fear after months of feeling “hounded and threatened”.

Mother-of-two Geeta Aulakh, 28, was found in Greenford with serious head wounds by a horrified passer-by. According to some reports she had been scalped and her throat cut.

Geeta, a radio station receptionist, was attacked moments before she was due to pick up her sons, Tejdeep and Karan, aged eight and 10, on Monday evening. She was taken to Charing Cross Hospital but later died.

Her husband, Harpreet Aulakh, 31, has been arrested with five other men.  It is thought Geeta had started divorce proceedings days earlier.

She had been too scared to go to the police, her sister Anita Shinh told the Standard, even though she had felt threatened for months.

Shinh added: “She feared for her life but she wasn’t able to talk about it to anyone. She didn’t want to worry us.” Weeks before her death, Geeta, who grew up in Southall, went to a family wedding in the Punjab, India.