Murder in the Name of Honor

by Rana Husseini

  This was one of the first cases of an honour killing to receive serious attention from the British press. But it is now known that such murders have been committed in the UK at least as far back as the 1970s.

  As usual, it took one extraordinary case to really alert the authorities and the media to the problem. It came in 2003 when Abdullah Yones received an anonymous letter at the south London offices of the Kurdish PUK (a political party aiming to achieve self-determination for the Kurdish people in Iraq) where he worked as a volunteer. This letter accused Heshu, his sixteen-year-old daughter, of behaving like a prostitute.

  The Yones family had fled Saddam’s Iraq in 1991 and soon settled in their west London community where Heshu attended the William Morris Academy. Heshu complained repeatedly to her teachers about the threat of forced marriage, but no one took it seriously, and no one (except for her closest friends, who saw the bruising) knew that by 2002 she was regularly beaten by her father.

  Her teachers noticed that Heshu was overly terrified of going home with a bad school report. What they didn’t realize was that Heshu was even more frightened that her father or brother would find out about her boyfriend, Nazim. As a result of this worry, her schoolwork started to suffer. The school thought it might be down to the influence of her boyfriend and so thought they were helping when they told her father.

  Heshu ran away from home. When her family found her in July 2002, they took her on what they later told police was a ‘happy family holiday’ to Pakistan. What they didn’t know was that Heshu kept a video diary in which she said over and over, ‘I hate it here,’ and described what really happened. They had taken her to Pakistan to marry her to her cousin, but when she failed a virginity test her father held a gun to her head and said, ‘I can’t give her away now.’ Her mother and brother saved her on that occasion.

  Upon her return to the UK, her brother discovered letters she’d written expressing her desire to run away again. On 12 October, her father locked her in her room and her brother and sister left the flat. Fearing for her life, Heshu called a friend on her mobile phone. She was interrupted when her father suddenly burst into the room and started yelling. Heshu hung up; her friend didn’t try to call back, not realizing what was about to happen and fearing it would just make her father angrier.

  Heshu fought for her life – her body was covered in defence wounds – but her father overpowered her, stabbing her seventeen times in her neck and back. Afterwards, Abdullah Yones cut his own throat and leapt from his balcony.

  He survived and when he was fit to be interviewed he denied having anything to do with his daughter’s murder, claiming that al-Qaeda agents had tried to murder them both. Then, when the police picked holes in this story, he changed his tune and said that Heshu had committed suicide and he had tried to kill himself out of grief.

  In the run-up to the trial, the local Kurdish community helped Abdullah Yones raise £125,000 in bail while threats were made against those who planned to give evidence against him. The police also uncovered a plan to help Abdullah flee the country.61

  The police also recovered Heshu’s video diaries and letters, in which she detailed her plan to run away. One of them, used in evidence at the Old Bailey, read:

  Goodbye Mum, I will see you again one day. Thank you a thousand times for trying so hard for me. I’m sorry I was such a bad friend. Some day I will try and make it up to you. Keep letting off that gas in your fat stomach. Enjoy life – now that I’m gone, there’s no more trouble. I promise you I will be good.

  Bye Dad, sorry I was so much trouble. Me and you will probably never understand each other. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted, but there’s some things you can’t change. Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick. I hope you enjoyed testing your strength on me; it was fun being on the receiving end. WELL DONE.

  The time has come for us to part. I’m sorry that I have caused so much pain, but after sixteen years of living with you it is evident that I shouldn’t be a part of you. I take all the blame openly – I’m not the child you wanted or expected me to be. DISAPPOINTMENTS ARE BORN OF EXPECTATIONS. Maybe you expected a different me and I expected a different you.

  One day when I have a proper job every penny I owe you will be repaid in full. I will find a way to look after myself. I will go to social security to get myself a flat or hostel. I will be okay. Don’t look for me, because I don’t know where I’m going yet. I just want to be alone. But I will be safe. So have a nice day, have a nice week, have a nice life, because the biggest problem in this house has now left.

  Bro, I’m not leaving you forever, just for a little while. I’m sorry to do this to you. I LOVE YOU MORE THAN I KNOW WHAT THE WORD LOVE MEANS. PLEASE FORGIVE ME!!! My problem has always been too much talk, too little action. So goodbye. One day you will see that I will make something good of myself. This isn’t an end, it’s just a new beginning, so enjoy. I’ll come and visit you at school, as often as I can. So you’ll be seeing a lot of me, okay?

  LIFE, BEING HOW IT IS, ISN’T NECESSARILY HOW IT IS. IT IS JUST SIMPLY HOW YOU CHOOSE TO SEE IT.

  Abdullah was tried in 2003, where he changed his plea to guilty at the last moment. Incredibly, when sentencing him, the judge said he was ‘taking into account the cultural considerations in this case’. He sentenced Abdullah to twelve years in prison.

  Abdullah Yones had murdered his daughter in his own home and yet the judge had treated the crime as less serious than if he had murdered a stranger in the street.

  Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair issued a statement that read: ‘Multiculturalism does not mean accepting the unacceptable.’ Home Office Minister Mike O’Brien agreed, issuing a similar statement, saying, ‘Multi-cultural sensitivity is no excuse for moral blindness.’

  This was the first case that London’s Metropolitan Police labelled as an honour killing. And while the case received widespread media coverage, the government was slow to address the issue, perhaps being overly cautious in the post-9/11 climate. The police, meanwhile, under the supervision of Commander Andy Baker at the Serious Crime Directorate, set up a small unit to deal specifically with the issue and work with women’s support groups in the UK.

  In June 2004, Commander Baker announced that the unit had decided to review 117 murder cases (fifty-two in London and sixty-five in other parts of England and Wales) over the past decade to establish whether ‘honour’ had been a contributing factor.62

  Currently, the UK police estimate that around twelve honour-related murders are committed against women in Muslim, Sikh and Christian families in the UK annually, although this figure is widely believed to be a conservative one. According to official figures released in 2008, seventeen thousand women in Britain are victims of honour-related crimes (including kidnapping, sexual assault and murder) every year. The Metropolitan Police said they believe many of the killings were carried out by contract killers hired by the families. Consequently, these crimes also involved so-called ‘bounty hunters’ as well as women who make a business out of tracking down victims, BBC News World Edition reported in June 2004.

  I met Commander Baker in March 2005 when he invited me to speak at an International Conference on Honour Based Violence held in London to examine the extent of so-called honour crimes and to help understand honour-based violence. The conference, which was attended by over three hundred delegates from the UK and abroad, was also aimed at examining proactive interventions and considering the issue of education in relation to honour-based violence. It was evident that the UK, which is more advanced than most other western countries in terms of identifying a strategy to deal with honour killings, still has a long way to go. This was made painfully apparent the following year.

  Twenty-year-old Banaz Mahmood was found by the police running barefoot in the street on 31 December 2005. Covered in blood, she begged the officer to help her. When Banaz explained that her father had forced her to drink brandy and was about to kill her when she smashed a windo
w and escaped, the constable was indifferent, thinking instead that Banaz was being ‘calculating and melodramatic’ and considered charging her for breaking the window.

  Although the police clearly weren’t going to help, Banaz’s boyfriend, Rahmat Suleimani, knew he should take her very seriously. He knew that their relationship was the reason for Banaz’s treatment. While Banaz was in the hospital, Rahmat sat at her bedside and used his mobile phone to record Banaz’s cry for help.

  There really wasn’t much more that Banaz could have done. She had already gone to Mitcham police station in south London on 4 December and told police that her family were planning to kill her. She was sent home and two officers came round to her house the next day. Banaz was too scared to open the door and there was no way she was going to talk to the police with her parents standing behind her. Banaz asked the police for help on a total of six occasions; she even wrote them a letter naming those she thought were plotting against her.

  Banaz was twelve years old when her family first arrived in England as asylum seekers, fleeing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. She arrived with her parents Mahmod and Behya, brother Bahman (aged twenty-nine) and sisters Beza (twenty-six), Payman (twenty-one), Giaband (seventeen) and Bekhal (fourteen). Mahmood was a former Iraqi soldier who beat his children for the smallest infraction. For example, Banaz was beaten for wearing hairspray.

  Her father had, in his own words, found ‘the David Beckham of husbands’ for Banaz to marry but after two violent years, Banaz left him and returned to the family home.

  She met Rahmat Suleimani, who was thirty-one years old, at a family party in 2005. They fell in love but her father disapproved of their relationship because Rahmat was from a different village and less religious.

  When Banaz learned of another plot to kill her, she went to the police again. This time they did listen and tried to persuade her to stay somewhere safe but she refused because she believed her mother would protect her.

  That was the last time she was seen alive.

  On the following day, communication between Banaz and her boyfriend stopped. When police officers first called at the family home her father said she wasn’t there. Two days later, the police launched a full-scale investigation after her father refused to report her missing.

  It took three months to find Banaz’s body. She was found after police tapped the family’s phones. Her body had been stuffed into a suitcase and buried in a garden in Birmingham. A post mortem revealed that Banaz had been strangled with a bootlace.

  She had undergone an horrific ordeal. Her father had watched for two hours as Banaz was raped and beaten by a pair of hitmen. This was supposed to be a form of humiliation for the woman who had shamed his family.

  Banaz’s sister Bekhal risked her life to testify against her sister’s killers during the three-month trial of her father and uncle at the Old Bailey. This was a first – a woman making a public stand against her family and community.

  Banaz’s boyfriend Rahmat also risked his life to testify. Her mother and three other sisters were too scared to co-operate with the police, fearing reprisals from their own community.

  Bekhal told the court that she herself had run away from home twice, once when her father attempted to make her marry her cousin in Iraq. They locked her in her bedroom for one week to force her to accept the marriage, but she escaped, went to the authorities and was eventually put into a foster home. She said:

  My parents again tracked me down and kept sending me audio tapes. At first they would be tearful, with my dad calling me his ‘little rose’. Then they became more menacing. My father told me that unless I went home he would kill all my sisters first, then my brother, then my mother, then himself, such was the shame I had brought on them. I believed him, so I went back. Did I think he was capable of doing that? Absolutely.

  Her father used exactly the same method to lure Banaz back home.

  Bekhal told the court that her father was so aggressive that when he saw her outdoors without a headscarf, he screamed at her that she was acting like a bitch, then took her home, spat on her and beat her with his slipper.63

  Bekhal’s only brother, Bahman, had attempted to kill her under direct orders from his father to cleanse their family’s honour. She said he had arranged to meet her in a remote area in South London and the minute she turned her back to him he struck her on her head with a steel bar.

  She fell, bleeding heavily; she shouted at her brother: ‘What are you doing?’ Bekhal said her brother, who obviously was against the plan that he was enacting, started to cry and said, ‘I’ve got to do it; you have brought shame on the family. It is my duty.’

  Bekhal convinced her brother to spare her life, called her boyfriend and went to hospital for treatment. She refused to file charges out of fear of shaming her family. She remained in hiding until a few months later she learned that Banaz had agreed to an arranged marriage set up by her father.

  ‘Why should we have to die for wanting no more than for our voices to be heard, to have a say in our lives?’ Bekhal said. ‘I will never be able to tell people who my father is – not only because of the risk to my life but because I’m ashamed. He is the one who has brought dishonour to our family … As I am separated from my family I have no one to share my memories of Banaz and no one to share my grief.’

  On 11 June 2007, Mahmood was found guilty of ordering the death of his twenty-year-old daughter. He was sentenced to life imprisonment along with his brother and the killer, thirty-year-old Mohamad Hama, who later boasted in prison how after torturing and raping Banaz for two hours he finally stamped on her neck to ‘get her soul out’.64

  In the lead-up to the trial the director and founder of the London-based Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organization (IKWRO), Diana Nammi, launched the ‘Justice for Banaz’ campaign, which forced the police to investigate their failure to help Banaz, and influenced their decision to review police procedures in dealing with family violence, especially in immigrant communities.

  The police issued a statement shortly after the trial, stating that they had failed to help Banaz. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) agreed. They said Banaz had been ‘let down’ by the police and suffered from delays, poor supervision and ‘a lack of understanding and insensitivity’. Six detectives from the Met and West Midlands received written warnings, and one Met constable received ‘words of advice’, according to a BBC report on 2 April 2008.

  Bekhal and Rahmat now face a future of secret addresses and identities. Afterwards, Rahmat said, ‘My life went away when Banaz died. The only thing keeping me going was to see justice being done for Banaz.’ She was ‘my present, my future, my hope’.

  Bekhal described her murdered sibling as ‘one of the most beautiful, loving, caring, easy-going girls you could ever hope to meet. Her only crime was to want to have some say in her life. Where is the shame in that? My life will always be at risk. There are people in my community who want to see me dead, and they will not rest until I am. I will never be safe.’

  Bekhal now wears a veil for a different reason: ‘so no one can recognize me.’

  It is clear that the police in the UK have a mountain to climb in terms of addressing honour killings, and not only because their occurrence in the UK has just recently been recognized. A major problem is that these murders very often have the support of the victim’s extended family and community; those of them who are opposed to it are often simply too frightened to speak up.

  Nazir Afzal, the lead prosecutor on honour-based violence at the Crown Prosecution Service, said, ‘In the case of Banaz … substantial members of the community actually did not assist and support prosecutors; instead they supported the family members responsible for the killing. They really didn’t care and it showed … The murder of Banaz was so brutal that it was a clear warning to others; it was a way of saying “don’t step put of line or this could be you”.’

  As well as a lack of support for prosecutors, there are also cases where pro
secution witnesses were terrorized until they withdrew their testimony. For example, in April 2008, Azeem Mohammad, aged twenty-six, was jailed for twenty-one months after admitting to intimidating witnesses in the case of an Iraqi Kurd beaten to death in an honour killing in Sheffield. Ismail Rashid, aged forty-two, was killed the previous year after having an affair with a married Pakistani woman. Three men were jailed for the killing.65

  Most so-called honour killings that have taken place in the UK have been carried out by people of Kurdish, Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin. Although many are carried out by first-generation immigrants, it’s increasingly becoming the case that the murderers are of the second generation. This suggests that many communities may not be as well integrated into British life as is widely thought. That is where the conflict lies; women are attracted to the liberal western values that promise more independence and equality, while men want to maintain their patriarchal system. This conflict is at the root of many honour killings. Most have been the result of relationships outside the family caste or religion.

  It is worth mentioning that there are no known cases in the UK of men being killed by their own families for sexual impropriety – reinforcing the idea that women are responsible for the maintenance of family honour, while men can do as they please. For example, Imran Rehman resisted his parents’ efforts to force him into marrying his first cousin when he was sixteen and she was eleven. Instead of telling him he was damaging the family honour, his father said that once Imran was married, the family’s honour would be satisfied and he would be free to behave as he wished. Imran is now a support worker at Karma Nirvana, a British charity which helps men and women at risk from honour killing and forced marriage.

  As we’ve just seen, the murders tend to be planned well in advance, with consent being sought from the extended family and volunteers being recruited to do the deed (although hitmen or relatives are sometimes brought in from abroad to carry out the killing). Sometimes the victim is lured or forced to travel abroad where the family feels they have a better chance of getting away with murder.