Today Zara's family reveal that even the Cabinet minister in charge of prisons and his top officials knew NOTHING about the incident three months later. The shocking story was only made public last week but Zara's aunt Farah Naz was told about it soon after it happened last April.
Farah said she mentioned it at a meeting in June with Alex Chalk - the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice - but he hadn't a clue.
Now she is demanding an inquiry into how killer Jordan McSweeney started a two-month relationship with a prison worker soon after he was sent to one of Britain's most secure jails.
The pair were finally discovered when guards at Belmarsh in south-east London kicked down a locked door to find them having sex. We can also reveal that the 32-year-old woman was not a prison guard but an employee from an outside agency.
Farah told us: "Is Belmarsh a social club or our country's most high-security prison? There are serious questions to be answered and we need a public investigation.
"Zara doesn't even get to breathe but her killer gets to have sex in prison.
There has to be a cover-up inside Belmarsh for all those people not to know. Otherwise the system is working worse than we believed." Incredibly, at a face-to-face meeting on June 26, Mr Chalk and senior prison and probation staff admitted they were unaware of the incident. Farah said:
"In May last year I first heard I was obviously shocked and disgusted but I presumed everyone else in the justice system would know, especially senior people.
"He had only been sentenced four months before the relationship was discovered and it had been one of the country's most high-profile court cases. You would imagine it would be at the forefront of their minds.
"But when I had a meeting with Alex Chalk on June 26 last year, which was on the first anniversary of Zara's death, I couldn't believe what happened.
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