When Dr Diana Cox, a pathologist at St Pancras mortuary, examined the body tagged "unknown female" she found dozens of small abrasions on the arms. "Consistent with healing self-inflicted injuries," she observed later. The "unknown female" had also suffered from several sexually transmitted diseases, including herpes and hepatitis B.
But Dr Cox did not need to know who this young girl was, her task was to determine the cause of death and so she busied herself with the inventory of the dead - brown hair dyed blond, a tattoo of a devil carrying a trident on the right shoulder, 13 years old and shaved legs.
Everyone has a name, an identity and although for a short time after her death she was called the "unknown female", Aliyah Ismail was once a schoolgirl in Middlesex who dyed her hair, went to London, and ended up being paid for sex on the sorrow-filled back streets of King's Cross.
Aliyah's descent into a world of drugs and prostitution, ending with her death from an overdose of methadone in a dirty flat in Camden Town, began when she ran away from foster home, child unit and then social worker. She had been sent to a children's home after her mother, Ms Agnes Hurley, who was frequently in hospital because of a long-term mental illness, could no longer cope with parenting. Her father had left the family home when Aliyah was a baby and so this "self-willed" girl, who had told friends she wanted to be an air hostess, found herself cut off from her family and faced with temptation.
A little under a year after she left home, social workers from Harrow social services department were trying to obtain a place for her in a compulsory secure unit. She had told her social worker that she was being paid for sex but nothing was done immediately to remove her from the streets, and it was only toward the end of her life that the social services responded to the danger Aliyah faced from herself and others.
Meanwhile, Aliyah was taking more and more heroin and methadone, and her new friends in London's sex scene suspected a "friend" was taking paedophile photographs of her to use in a video.
Her boyfriend, Anthony, a 17-year-old heroin addict, was the only witness during Aliyah's final hours in October last year. He told police that a prostitute had given Aliyah a bottle of methadone after she was attacked by another prostitute on the street. She and Anthony went to sleep and when he woke up the next day Aliyah was unconscious and she had vomit in her mouth.
She was pronounced dead shortly afterwards at University College Hospital but Anthony didn't even know her real name or where she came from, so she became just another "unknown female".
Next month, an independent inquiry is expected to severely criticise Harrow social services department and other welfare agencies which were responsible for Aliyah's care. It is understood that Harrow social services has already suspended two senior social workers on charges of gross misconduct related to the case, and a third junior social worker is also facing a misconduct charge, but has not been suspended.
In hindsight, Aliyah's death is a tragedy, yet at the time her story would probably have made a few paragraphs in the local paper and been forgotten. But an investigation by the London Evening Standard has discovered what it describes as a "half-hearted" police investigation of Aliyah's death, with several easily traceable friends and associates claiming they have not been inter viewed by police.
Aliyah was arrested six times by the police, but each time she ended up back on the streets of King's Cross. If the police told her about the help available to her she did not act on it. Friends told her about Childline, the national helpline for young people, but she never called.
Mr Hereward Harrison, Child line's Director of children services, says social services and voluntary groups need to do much more to help children like Aliyah. "It is up to all of us to co-ordinate services and make them work," he says. "We need to tell young people about safe houses, outreach programmes and tell them about these services when they are not heavily hooked on drugs or being used by the sex trade. We also need young people who have been through this to be trained up to work with others and broaden out the services."
Aliyah was not a prostitute, says Mr Harrison, "she was sexually abused by adults who were paying for it. She was a young person and we need to look at the issue of the sex trade differently." Describing Aliyah as a prostitute allows people to forget about her or to say that she is not worth their pity, says Mr Harrison. But Aliyah was only one of about 800 boys and girls being abused in Britain's sex trade "and that is probably only the tip of the iceberg. These children are absolutely terrified by pimps and if this develops into dependency on drugs they can hardly get out of it."
Childline can be contacted in Britain on 0800 1111.