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Video - UK Honor Killing
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AP Banaz
Mahmod, 20, was told by her father and uncle that she shamed her family
by falling in love with a man who was not her arranged husband. |
June
11, 2007
LONDON
- A father who ordered his daughter brutally slain for falling in love with the
wrong man in a so-called “honor killing” was found guilty of murder on Monday.
Banaz
Mahmod, 20, was strangled with a boot lace, stuffed into a suitcase and buried
in a back garden.
Her
death is the latest in an increasing trend of such killings in Britain, home to
some 1.8 million Muslims. More than 100 homicides are under investigation as
potential “honor killings.”
Mahmod
Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, planned the killing during a family
meeting, prosecutors told the court. Two others have pleaded guilty in the
case. Two more suspects have fled the country. Sentencing is expected later
this month.
The men accused the young woman
of shaming her family by ending an abusive arranged marriage, becoming too
Westernized and falling in love with a man who didn’t come from their Iraqi
village. The Kurdish family came to Britain in 1998 when Banaz Mahmod was 11.
“She was my present, my future,
my hope,” said Rahmat Suleimani, 29, Banaz Mahmod’s boyfriend.
During the three-month trial,
prosecutors said Mahmod’s father beat his daughter for using hairspray and
adopting other Western ways. Her uncle once told her she would have been
“turned to ashes” if she were his daughter and had shamed the family by
becoming involved with the Iranian Kurd, her sister 22-year-old Bekhal Mahmod
testified.
Banaz Mahmod ran away from home
when she was a teenager but returned when her father sent her an audio tape in
which he warned he would kill her sisters, her mother and himself if she did
not come home, her sister said.
Sister fearful of her own
life
She was later hospitalized after her brother attacked her, the sister told the
court. The brother said he had been paid by their father to finish her off but
in the end was unable to do it, said the sister, who testified in a full black
burqa. She said she still feared for her own life.
|
John Stillwell / AP Bekhal
Mahmod, Banaz's sister, testified that that her brother was ordered to kill
Banaz, but couldn't go through with it. |
The years of Banaz Mahmod’s abuse
were compounded by police officers who repeatedly dismissed her cries for help.
She first went to police in
December 2005, saying she suspected her uncle was trying to kill her and her
boyfriend. She sent police a letter naming the men who she thought would later
kill her.
On New Year’s Eve, she was lured
by her father to her grandmother’s home, where she suspected he planned to
attack her after he forced her to gulp down brandy and approached her while
wearing gloves. She escaped by breaking a window and was treated at a hospital.
Police dismissed her suspicions,
and one officer, who is under investigation, considered charging her with
damages for breaking her grandmother’s window.
Laying in her hospital bed after
the escape, Mahmod recorded a dramatic video message saying she was “really
scared.”
The videotape, taken by her
boyfriend at the hospital, was shown to the jury during the trial.
Woman told family she
wasn't seeing boyfriend
After she was released from the hospital, she returned home and tried to
convince her family she had stopped seeing her boyfriend.
But friends told the family they
spotted the couple together on Jan. 22, 2006.
Soon after, a group of men
allegedly approached her boyfriend and tried to lure him into a car but he
refused. It was that event that prompted Banaz Mahmod to go to police again.
This time officers tried to persuade her to stay in a safe house. She refused,
believing that her mother would protect her.
But her mother and father left her
alone in the house the next day. Her boyfriend alerted police after time passed
in which she failed to send him text messages.
Her body wasn’t discovered until
three months later after police tracked phone records.
Britain has seen more than 25
women killed by their Muslim relatives in the past decade for offenses they
believed brought shame on the family. More than 100 other homicides are under
investigation as potential honor killings.
Some Muslim communities in
Britain practice Sharia, or strict Islamic law.
“We’re seeing an increase around the world, due in part to the rise in Islamic fundamentalism,” said Diana Nammi with the London-based Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organization.
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