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Sulaimaniyah court hears
how Kurdish man staged "insurgent" attack on his
Norwegian wife.
Three men have been sentenced to death in
Sulaimaniyah for the September
2004 murder of a Norwegian woman which was made to
look like an insurgent attack.
The court heard that 39-year-old Marita Strom was
killed by hitmen hired by her Kurdish husband
Faraydoon Latif, who had apparently tired of her
liberated western attitudes, which he saw as a "lack
of respect" for him.
Strom was travelling by car in Sulaimaniyah with her
husband and two of their children when they were
ambushed by gunmen. She was shot dead and her
five-year-old daughter was slightly injured in the
attack.
After the murder, Strom's three children were taken
back to Norway, where they now live with her
relatives.
Nine months later, Latif was arrested and charged
with hiring two hitmen to carry out the attack.
After pronouncing a guilty verdict on March 10, the
head of the trial committee, Judge Farooq
Abdul-Wahid, told IWPR, "The murder of the Norwegian
woman was carried out by three persons, one of whom
was her husband."
Latif, 32, met Strom after he was granted refugee
status in Norway in 1995 under the name of Osman
Omer Osman. The couple married during their first
trip together to Kurdistan in 1999.
According to evidence, Latif came back to Kurdistan
in 2004 to plan his wife's murder, arranging it to
look like an extremist attack in the hope that the
local police would blame insurgents opposed to the
presence of United States forces.
Latif paid two men 4,000 US dollars each to kill his
wife. One, Aras Ibrahim, told the court, "Latif and
I planned the scenario of the murder, but I had
second thoughts and said I wouldn't do it."
Ibrahim and Latif then hired a second man, Kamal
Jalal Fattah, to pull the trigger.
Fattah told the court that Latif asked him to kill
Strom because she did not respect her husband and
spent all his money, and admitted that the three men
had made two previous attempts on her life. On one
occasion, they took her to Kirkuk under the pretext
of attending a funeral. They intended to kill her
along the way, but aborted the attempt after
encountering too many vehicles and passers-by on the
road.
The husband denied the charges, claiming that an
earlier confession made by him had been extracted
under torture.
However, the court found the defendants guilty,
noting, "The incident is clear and obvious and the
investigations provide the evidence". All three were
sentenced to death.
Outside the courthouse after the verdict, Azad
Ahmed, Latif's advocate, said, "The court made its
decision without taking my defence statement into
account. Of course I'll appeal against it."
An appeal was immediately lodged, and Latif also
asked the government of Norway to help.
Norwegian foreign ministry official Steven Everson,
who came to Kurdistan to monitor the trial, refused
to comment on the sentence but told IWPR, "The
Norwegian government does not support capital
punishment for any criminal."
There have been some calls for the Norwegian foreign
ministry to seek Latif's extradition back to Norway
in order to save his life, but his citizenship there
is now under review because he provided a false name
to the authorities when he originally sought asylum.
But the presiding judge said, "There isn't anything
about this incident that would allow us to be
lenient on the three men. It was a deliberate
murder, and the punishment is execution [as
stipulated by] the Iraqi penal code."
Latif's laywer told IWPR that no death sentence has
actually been carried out in Kurdistan since it
gained regional autonomy in 1991. There have been 40
such judgements since then, each of which was
commuted to life imprisonment.
Sirwan Ghareeb is an IWPR trainee journalist in
Sulaimaniyah.
Knives out on Sulaimaniyah's street
18.3.2005
By Rebaz Mahmood in Sulaimaniyah
Stabbings are common as
young men sort out their differences in a climate of
lawlessness.
Twenty-one-year-old Harem Muhiyaddin remembers the
time he lay bleeding, surrounded by emergency-room
doctors. "I'll never forget the pain," he says.
Muhiyaddin is just one of an increasing number of
victims of stabbings.
Although guns firearms may provide the iconic image
of violence in Iraq, knives are often the weapon of
choice in street crime or brawls.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the
general lack of security has created more demand for
cold steel, and porous frontiers have increased the
supply and range of weapons on offer.
"Since Operation Iraqi Freedom, the number of
patients wounded with knives has gone up," said
Rebwar Rostam, an emergency doctor at Sulaimaniyah
Emergency Hospital.
Homicide rates have shot up across Iraq as a result
of the breakdown in law and order.
A survey conducted by Associated Press found that
the northern city of Kirkuk had 34 reported murders
a month last year compared with three a month in
2002. The figures for other towns reflected similar
trends: Karbala in the Shia south, for example, had
55 such cases a month as against one a month in
2002.
These killings were of course carried out in
different ways, but the prevalence of knives is a
growing contributory factor when it comes to casual
violence and petty crime, as they are cheaper than
guns and easier to conceal.
"Large numbers of people get injured by knives,"
said Sulaimaniyah doctor Hawrey Abdul-Sattar. He has
treated many of the victims, including a woman
wounded by her own brother and a mother stabbed by
her son.
Social worker Hemin Aziz notes that young male
adults are particularly quick to resort to such
weapons, "The increased availability of combat
knives is doubly harmful because in addition to the
violence itself, they breed a spirit of aggression."
That means that verbal disputes can swiftly escalate
into physical violence.
On March 16 this year, for example, five friends
were drinking at the Safeen bar on a major street in
Sulaimaniyah when a fight broke out among them.
One of the group, known as Big Kamal, ended up
stabbed in the chest, and he was dead by the time
police arrived. He himself is said to have knifed
someone to death a few years ago.
The result of this widespread knife culture is that
the accident wards are full of young men who have
been stabbed.
"I'm on duty once a week at Sulaimaniyah Emergency
Hospital, and we get knife-wound cases most of the
time," said Dr Rostam. "Sometimes four or five
people get injured in a single fight, most of them
young males."
In the Kurdish region, many of the weapons have been
imported.
"We bring swords, medium-sized knives and small ones
across the border, some of them from Turkey. And we
pay customs fees," said Jamal Majeed, a wholesale
trader who is catering for the increased demand.
As Majeed indicated, much of the import trade is
perfectly legal as not many types of bladed weapon
are actually illegal.
With knives so plentiful and violence still
commonplace, young men will continue ending up in
hospital and in the morgue.
Rubbing the scar on his left cheek, a recovering
Muhiyaddin plans to add to the casualty figures
personally.
"Just let me heal, then I'll get my revenge. And
I'll do them over even worse."
Rebaz Mahmood is an IWPR trainee journalist in
Sulaimaniyah.
www.iwpr.net
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