‘But what about Yasmin? Who should then defend her? She was also a victim. Was her life worth nothing?’
The judge looked at me and said nothing. For a fleeting second, I felt that my argument had had an impact on him. But it was time for me to leave; the judge told me he was a busy man. I had pushed too hard.
Inam Asha, a social worker and activist who had seen Yasmin at the police station, offered me further details. The head of the station told her about the interrogation that took place. Yasmin had arrived at the station with her brother-in-law, the rapist, and he had asked her to claim that someone else raped her to cover up his crime. Yasmin tried to obey but because she was scared she kept getting the story wrong. Finally, after one of the interrogators slapped her across the face, she collapsed and told the truth.
My courtroom encounter with Sarhan was not the last. He was repeatedly interviewed by many local and international media agencies, some of which I worked for as a mediator. On one occasion, after Sarhan had finished an interview, I asked him if he regretted what he had done. He said that the murder had ruined his life. Today, he said, no woman wants to marry him. He had tried to seek the hand of eleven women in marriage, but they all refused, including a cousin whose father had encouraged him to kill his sister.
‘They all refused for fear that I might kill them or my daughters one day. But if I were put in the same situation again I would kill my sister and any other sister who goes through the same thing. This is our society, this is how we are brought up and it will never change.’
He nostalgically told me he was treated as a hero in prison. ‘All the men who were with me for the same reason in prison were treated as heroes by everybody.’ Once he was back in the real world, he was ignored and felt worthless.
Sarhan kept telling me how much he loved his sister, even though he ended her life. ‘She was so close to me. She was the one who resembled me the most. I had to kill her, I had no other choice. This is what our society wants. It is better to sacrifice one soul than to sacrifice my whole family.’
But he insisted his sibling died unjustly. ‘I am sure of that fact. No one wants to be the one to kill his sister, but traditions and society inflict things on us that we really do not want to do. If society would not have shunned us after her rape, we would not have killed her and instead locked her inside the house until she died or someone married her.’
Sarhan’s family’s promises of rewarding him and helping him out for killing his sister were never fulfilled. He has been unable to find regular work and instead does odd jobs every now and then.
In one of our most recent interviews, he told me, ‘To be honest with you, Rana, I am scared to have female children because society is harsh and I have a feeling that I might want to bury my female daughter because this is what I would feel is right… I wish my other sister would get married quickly because women are a source of concern. If something goes wrong, they do not pay the price; we do.’
He also acknowledged that his lenient punishment would encourage him and other males to murder again in the name of honour.
‘If the state amends the law to execute men who kill their female relatives or lock us behind bars for good, I do not think that any family would venture and push her male relative to kill. No family wants to see its male relative executed or locked up for good.’
His final comment to me was, ‘I hope that the situation will change because I alone cannot change or fix things in my society. My whole society has to change.’
Even Khalid, who admitted to murdering Kifaya, received a lenient sentence of seven-and-a-half years and was released for good behaviour two years early. I only found out by accident when I returned to the scene of the crime to try and speak to Kifaya’s father. They weren’t there but the neighbours told me that Khalid was living on the first floor of their three-storey building. Feelings of anger and excitement flowed through my veins as I climbed the stairs and knocked on his door.
The door opened slowly and a short, tired-looking man in his mid-thirties asked me who I was. He invited me into the tiny one-room flat. Inside, he had mattresses spread out on the floor and so I chose a small one and sat on it. Khalid called his wife and asked her to make us some tea.
I started by asking him about his days in prison. ‘All my cellmates sympathized with me and treated me as a champion. All the men who were in the prison for killing their sisters or female relatives were treated as champions.’
He told me he realized that what he did was against the Sharia (Islamic law), ‘but society is stronger than me or religion. I had to kill her to preserve the family’s honour. Society imposes rules on us and I did it to please society. No one was talking to me in the street. We live in a backward society that imposes backward ideas on our lives.’
He also told me bitterly that he suffered even though he was treated as a hero in prison. ‘It was a tough experience that I had to go through. I have four children that I have been deprived of being with for over five years and now I am trying to compensate for these lost years.’
‘Do you regret killing your sister and if you were put in the same situation again would you kill her?’
His answer was similar to many I would hear from killers I interviewed over the coming years.
‘No, I do not regret killing Kifaya. But if I went back in time, I would not kill my sister. I would tie her up like a sheep in the house until she either died or someone married her. I have wasted enough of my life in prison and I would not repeat the same mistake.’
His words made me realize that Khalid was, like his sister, but to a lesser extent, a victim of his own society; a victim of ancient and unfair traditions that turned a normal human being into a killer.
Three years after Kifaya’s murder, I found her father. I had been planning to do a follow-up story on her family but hadn’t held out much hope of finding them in the same area. I knocked on the door and it was opened slowly, revealing a white-haired and sad-faced man in his mid-fifties. He invited us in, confirming in a sorrowful voice, ‘Yes, I am her father’.
He ushered us into the sparsely furnished living room. A small coffee table was surrounded by mattresses where we sat. Kifaya’s father called one of his daughters and asked her to make us tea.
‘I am against what they did,’ he told me. ‘I would never have allowed anyone to kill my daughter, no matter what. Damn them for taking such a decision.’
At the time of the murder, he was working in the USA. ‘I immediately returned to Jordan when I heard that my daughter had been killed. I could not believe it. I did not expect them to kill her. They did it because they were jealous of me living and working in the US.’ He laughed bitterly and told me, ‘You should see the kind of life I had in the US they were so envious of. I worked the dirty jobs that most immigrants take – as a garbage collector, a mechanic, a grass-cutter.’
I felt his bitterness as he talked. He told me that his wife, Kifaya’s mother, died of cancer six months after her daughter’s murder.
‘Kifaya’s mother had a hand in her death,’ he added.
I was startled. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him quickly.
‘Her mother helped plot her murder along with her uncles,’ he explained.
I screamed, ‘But why?’ He couldn’t give me an answer. I thought that maybe she had no choice because they might have killed her as well had she not helped.
One of Kifaya’s sisters offered me a small glass of tea. Her two siblings sat quietly next to their father. I asked him about Mohammad, the brother who raped Kifaya. ‘Let him rot in prison. I have no sympathy for him. I do not want to see him ever again in my life.’
I then asked for his permission to discuss Kifaya’s murder with his three daughters. The eldest sister, who was fifteen at the time of the murder, said Kifaya did not deserve to be killed and Mohammad was to blame for all the misery they had endured since her death.
The middle-aged sister, who was thirteen at the time, was undecided; she did
not know what to think. The youngest sister, twelve at the time of the murder, was the most critical of her sister’s actions. She blamed Kifaya for everything that had since gone wrong and accused her of destroying the stability of their family. She told me Kifaya had ruined her father and that both brothers were in jail because of her.
I asked the older sister if they had a photo of Kifaya. I just wanted to see her face and see what she looked like. I wanted to read her features, to try and get to know her, to establish her identity.
‘We don’t have any photos of Kifaya. Her uncles burned them all.’
It was as if she had never existed.
CHAPTER 3
Honour as an Excuse
Zarqa, about thirty kilometres north of Amman, is Jordan’s industrial capital. It sits on the edge of the great eastern desert that stretches all the way to Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Founded in the 1920s, the large town is home to Jordan’s main oil refinery as well as several military bases. Together, they have turned the river black.
In the autumn of 1995, Zarqa’s market square was packed with people, vehicles and goods as usual. Traders competed with the old trucks to be heard and shoppers shouted to each other as they discussed the wares, competing in the din.
Suddenly, a window in a residential house above the square shattered. Stunned shoppers screamed as they saw a young woman plunge twenty feet through a shop awning, landing headfirst on the pavement. Still conscious, she fought to stand, but, badly concussed, she swayed and half-collapsed, half-sat down in the street.
A horrified shopkeeper who had rushed outside recognized the young woman. Her name was Kifaya and she was twenty-three years old. He looked up at the window and saw her brother Mohammad, shouting at the fallen woman. He knew Mohammad well; everyone knew him to be a troublemaker who had been in and out of prison for various petty crimes. He held a pistol in his hand. People thronging in the busy street screamed and ran for cover as he fired; the first three bullets missed their target, ricocheting off the road.
The shopkeeper started to run to help Kifaya, but he was too late. The fourth bullet was deadly. It struck her in the head.
* * *
On 30 December 1995, I went to the Criminal Court as part of my routine tour looking for new verdicts. Most verdicts were usually published at the end of each month. I knocked and entered the office of one of the judges with whom I had become friendly.
‘Anything interesting coming up?’ I asked.
He told me there was a much bigger story than anything happening in his court that day. ‘I just heard from one of our criminal prosecutors that a thirty-eight-year-old man shot and killed his two sisters in Zarqa and then fled before turning himself in the following day.’
‘Is it related to family honour?’
The judge nodded. There was something about this case that was unusual. Killers who struck in the name of honour normally turned themselves in immediately, proud of what they had done. I asked the judge why he thought this man had waited a day.
He said he was told that the killer sounded confused and scared and had run to a friend’s house to hide. He had spent the night there before his friend persuaded the murderer to turn himself in.
The next day the killer handed investigators the gun he’d used and re-enacted the crime in front of the prosecutor and other officials. The only other thing the judge knew was that the murderer had claimed he’d found a ‘strange man’ in his sister’s house.
I thanked him and said I would head to Zarqa to check out the story. Next I called Widad Adas, my close friend who is a researcher, hoping she’d want to join me. I was very happy to hear that she did.
Zarqa is less westernized and more conservative than many places in Jordan. My T-shirt would have attracted angry responses there, so this time I wore long sleeves, which made the midday heat all the more intense. I was directed to the crime scene almost immediately with no question.
I spoke to a man in his fifties who owned a vegetable shop and who knew the murder victims, Kifaya and her older sister Nadia, who was thirty-two. ‘Sure, they were killed by their brother, Mohammad, a real troublemaker that one,’ he told me as he heaved crates of vegetables round his store. ‘I saw it happen with my own eyes.’ He pointed to a building exactly opposite his shop. ‘Kifaya fell from that window.’
‘Was it an honour killing?’ I asked.
‘It had nothing to do with “honour”. Nadia and Kifaya were regular customers of mine. They were killed for their inheritance. Those poor women were totally innocent. Everyone here knows this is the truth.’
I asked him if the police and the investigators knew this. He said he had no idea but insisted everyone in the neighbourhood knew that these two women were ‘innocent of any wrong doing’.
‘Kifaya’s brother was a good shooter, he used to be a security officer.’ He looked down at the ground, his eyes wet. ‘It was only later that I found out he’d killed Nadia too.’
I thanked him and we headed to the shop next door where we spoke to a thirty-year-old woman. ‘I fainted when the bullet hit Kifaya in the head,’ she told me.
She also stressed that Kifaya and Nadia had good reputations in the neighbourhood, while their brother, Mohammad, had a criminal record. ‘He was known to be a troublemaker and had been in jail.’
She told me she heard that Mohammad killed his sisters because ‘Nadia was married to a man without the knowledge of her brother, and when he learned about it, he killed them.’
‘But everyone knew that Mohammad often quarrelled with his two sisters over their share of the inheritance. He wanted them to give their share up to him.’
Several other shopkeepers repeated a similar story as we walked from one side of the square to the other.
The following day I went to the chief prosecutor’s office; he was a man I knew and got on with quite well. When I asked him about the murder of the two sisters, he confidently said, ‘It is a crime of honour. The suspect killed his two sisters because he found a strange man in the house.’
He made no mention of the inheritance issue or the alleged ‘secret marriage’. I was surprised that while the inheritance story was the talk of the community, the chief prosecutor had no knowledge of it.
I excitedly told him about my own investigation, believing that he would instruct his investigators to act on this new and important information. Instead, he looked at me benignly and, with a calm smile, he asked, ‘Why do you care for such small and minor cases? Forget about this story. It is not important; you’re wasting your time.’
I couldn’t believe it. My information should have transformed the investigation.
Instead, Mohammad was charged with the manslaughter of his sisters after finding a strange man in the house. As expected, the court said the defendant benefited from a reduction in penalty as stipulated in Article 98 of the Penal Code because he ‘committed his crime in a fit of fury to cleanse his family’s honour’. He was also entitled to a reduction because his family dropped the charges against him.
Mohammad claimed that on the morning of the incident he stopped by the house to pick up his mother. After she came down, she realized she had forgotten to bring something from the house. Mohammad offered to get it for her. He climbed the stairs to the apartment and knocked on the door. His sisters took a while to answer. When they did answer, they looked scared and confused. He became suspicious, searched the house and found a strange man inside. The man pushed him aside and fled, Mohammad said. He claimed he tried to catch up with him, but failed. Instead, he returned to the apartment to face his two sisters.
He claimed in court that Kifaya told him ‘this man is not mine’. Mohammad drew a gun he was carrying, shot his sister Nadia in the head and chest and then went after his other sister, Kifaya. Kifaya jumped out of the window through the glass. Mohammad confirmed that he fired at her from the window.
The court said it relied in its ruling on Mohammad’s testimony (there were no witnesses who spoke against him) and the te
stimony of a neighbour who told the authorities he overheard the argument. He said he heard the footsteps of a man descending the stairs quickly, although he did not see anyone.
There was no testimony from a witness or family member mentioning the inheritance. There was no mention of any stranger leaving the apartment building on the day of the incident either, apart from the neighbour who only claimed to have heard footsteps.
The prosecution didn’t question the defendant on why he chose to kill his two sisters instead of going after the man allegedly found in their room. It would have been much easier for Mohammad to run to the door and ask people in the busy market to help him capture the man. The court didn’t even ask Mohammad if the stranger could have been an intruder who broke in to the house.
Mohammad was sentenced to one year in prison.
I was so frustrated by the verdict; people are given the same sentence for trying to cash a bad cheque, and a longer sentence for robbery. I could not sleep; I became obsessed. I told Kifaya’s and Nadia’s story to everyone I knew and made it the topic of every conversation. An influential official from the same tribe as the killer confirmed the story about the inheritance, adding that Mohammad had good connections that helped get him off the hook.
* * *
A few weeks later, I travelled to the scene of yet another murder, this time where a man had shot his twenty-nine-year-old sister dead. He said she was a Christian and had planned to marry a Muslim man. The real reason was that he wanted to take over the flat her fiancé had given to her and move into it with his mother.
This time, because the woman’s fiancé was influential, the killer ended up receiving a fifteen-year prison term but this was reduced by half after his mother dropped the charges against him.
A police officer who visited the crime scene told me the victim was sitting on the couch talking to her brother and brushing her hair when he shot her five times in the head from behind. ‘I’ll never forget. When we arrived she was still sitting on the couch, and the brush was still hanging in her hair.’
Murder in the Name of Honor Page 3