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UK: Sins of the Father
12.11.2007
By David J. Smith |
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In a
suburban McDonald’s a father begged his wayward
daughter to come home... so he and the men of her
family could have her beaten, raped and murdered.
Fearing violence, but moved by his tears, she
relented – and died. Our correspondent investigates
how a man can choose the death of a daughter above
dishonour
November
12, 2007
LONDON, UK, -- Ari Mahmod held his head up
when he went to prison. He felt no embarrassment.
And why should he? After all, he said, it was not as
if he was locked up for something as inconsequential
or shameful as theft. He was sure that, back in the
real world of suburban Mitcham, south London, among
his own people, they would be thanking his family
for what he had done, taking pride in the decisive
way he had acted.
Many people might find it hard to comprehend that
any man could take pride – pleasure, even – in the
brutal murder of his niece. Banaz Mahmod had been
beaten, probably raped, and finally strangled with a
bootlace in the living room at home. Her uncle Ari
had not been there, but he had planned it, knew
exactly what was happening, and had been waiting
nearby… waiting for his family reputation to be
restored. |
Banaz Mahmod Babakir Agha, Found dead, brutally
killed by her family. Banaz had left her husband and
fall in love with an Iranian Kurd. |
As he liked to say, in his culture, reputation was
more important than life itself. That was why it had
to be done – why his brother’s daughter had to die.
In Kurdistan- Iraq – as elsewhere in parts of south
Asia and the Middle East – they would not even have
needed to bother hiding the body. Honour crimes –
such as the recent stoning to death in Iraq of Du’a
Khalil Aswad, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl who had
fallen in love with the wrong boy – were at the time
often committed by a group or crowd of men, quite
openly, in public.
In Du’a’s case, her death had been recorded on
mobile-phone cameras and uploaded onto YouTube,
where two police officers could be seen standing
about doing nothing while Du’a was killed. In
Kurdistan, honour crimes are still being committed
at the rate of three or four a week and, despite a
recent tightening of the law, offenders are still
going unpunished or receiving light sentences.
But in Mitcham, purifying the family shame was not
quite as straightforward as Ari might have wished.
And not everyone thought being an honour killer was
quite so honourable.
Ari’s teenage daughter Ala had been in the house on
the day in December 2005 when the men of the
extended family gathered to agree between themselves
that Banaz would have to die. While the men were
talking, Ala overheard what was going on. She was
upstairs at a computer having a discussion on MSN
Messenger with her cousin Jwan.
It emerged that Ala had been told Banaz was having
an affair. She thought that was disgusting, and said
Banaz would go straight to hell, but “if I find out
anyone will kill her I will go to the police”. Jwan
warned her to be careful: “They’ll kill you next.”
Ala said she was not going to sit and keep quiet
about something like this, it was too serious. “This
is someone’s life. Who gives a shit what some
flippin’ immigrant butchers think. Who are these
guys to talk? None of them are innocent.”
This too – the family council meeting, a kind of
crisis-management team – was a cultural tradition
the Mahmods had brought with them from their rural
tribal homeland in the Sulaimaniyah district of
Kurdistan, where their land and property titles and
powerful ancestors had bestowed upon them the
inherited title of agha – lord – which went with
their name.
Ari Mahmod Babakir Agha was the head of the family,
one of four brothers who were all now living with
their wives and children in south London. He was not
the eldest brother – that was Mahmod, the father of
Banaz – but for a number of reasons, primarily based
on Ari’s success as a businessman since coming to
the UK in the 1990s, and Mahmod’s family troubles,
Ari had taken the ascendant role. The two older
brothers, both in their early fifties, had little
time for each other, and Mahmod had suffered a
degree of social exclusion from the wider family.
Ari was not the only one who thought Mahmod was
weak. And perhaps Mahmod, like many others, thought
Ari was arrogant, lording it over the rest of his
family, especially at his home in Mitcham, which was
much larger than Mahmod’s. He had a Lexus on the
drive and inside a shag-pile carpet so deep you
could get lost in it.
Ari would sit sprawled in the centre of the sofa
with his arms outstretched, the lion king overseeing
his domain. Everyone else would arrange themselves
humbly around him.
The police never could figure out quite what
Mahmod’s business was, or if he worked at all, but
Ari owned a supermarket on the Wandsworth Road in
south London, rental properties, a banking business
moving money between Kurdistan and the UK, and
almost certainly a sideline, arranging visas and
falsifying details for immigration. Ari and Mahmod
certainly knew how to play the system.
Mahmod had five girls and one boy. His only son,
Bahman, had accumulated a minor criminal history in
the 10 years since the family arrived in the UK as
asylum seekers. Bahman’s nickname among those who
knew him outside the family was Tony Montana, as in
the Al Pacino character in the gangster movie
Scarface. But despite his misdeeds, Mitcham’s answer
to Tony Montana had not apparently brought shame
into Mahmod’s home – a modest semidetached house on
Morden Road, with gnomes on the flat roof over the
front door. No, as his nephew Azad told me, it was
the girls who were the problem: people looked at
Mahmod’s family and said they produced whores.
Mahmod could not control his daughters. Though he
had tried. Before coming to the UK he had arranged
for his daughters to be circumcised – a shocking,
traumatic ritual carried out by the girls’
grandmother, with their heads wedged in her lap
while two other female relatives helped pin them
down.
Bekhal, Mahmod’s third daughter, who was about 10 at
the time, had accidentally found the clitoridectomy
kit beforehand – a sharp knife, a bottle of alcohol
and some cotton wool – not knowing what it was for
until she peered in through the window and saw what
was going on, and ran away, only to be dragged back
to take her turn. Her grandmother had cataracts and
couldn’t see properly. Bekhal recalled a cut nerve
and torrents of blood. It was supposed to dampen
their sexual pleasure, apparently, but if that was
the case, it had not been a complete success. Bekhal,
two years older than Banaz, had been the first
daughter to make life hard for Mahmod. She was lucky
not to be dead too. Now 23, she would remain in
police protection for many years – to save her from
harm at the hands of her own family.
As she described it, life had not been much fun back
in Kurdish Iraq. As a girl – indeed as a woman – all
you were supposed to do was cook, clean and shut up,
and she had no idea there was anything more on offer
until she arrived with the family in the UK in her
early teens.
Bekhal and her sisters were not allowed out like
“normal” children, even back in Iraq, so did not
learn much about the ways of the world except what
filtered through from the family. Bekhal heard
stories of honour killings – a boy and girl shot in
the head in the park after they were caught sneaking
out to spend time together; a girl who vanished
after being discovered passing notes under the door
to a boyfriend.
As Bekhal well knew, Kurdish society was patriarchal
and based on the repression of women. The rise of
Islam had only made matters worse – nobody was in
any doubt that a stricter Islamic faith had
contributed to an increase in the incidence of
honour killing. Though, of course, honour killing
was not just confined to Muslim communities. It
happened among Sikhs and Hindus too, and it had also
featured in Italian law for 60 years, until 1981,
during which time killing to restore family honour
was a recognised mitigation for murder. We can at
least take comfort from the fact that such brutality
is mercifully rare. And the vast majority of Muslim,
Sikh and Hindu people, not just in Britain but
abroad, are against honour killings. Many are
involved in active campaigns to prevent them, or
amend the laws that excuse them.
Mahmod’s daughters went to a local school in Mitcham,
where they soon felt the tug of outside influences.
Bekhal had friends from all races, as reflected by
the new world she lived in. Her family disapproved,
especially of black people, who some of them
referred to as cockroaches.
Bekhal had a rebellious spirit, and would not be
stopped. This led to violent scenes at home with her
father, when she experimented with her hair or wore
snakeskin jeans that her dad tried to grab at: where
do you think you’re going, some prostitutes’ club?
The shape of your body is showing. You’re a bitch, a
whore. Some days she would wear a headscarf leaving
the house and take it off around the corner. She
would also be followed by young men in the wider
family, who would report back to her father on her
wrongdoings. Bekhal pushed her parents to the limits
and soaked up the punishment.
Later, once they’d moved to London, Bekhal was with
her female cousin Shno and they met a local Asian
boy called Ash. They walked with him a while before
sitting down between some parked cars to have a
cigarette. Bekhal felt something was wrong, sensed
they were being watched, and sure enough, Shno’s
brother
Azad appeared on his bicycle. According to Bekhal,
Azad dropped the bike, took off his helmet and
started hitting the boy in the head, swearing at
him, what the f*** do you think you’re doing with my
sister? What the f*** are you whores doing here with
him? He was spitting in the Asian boy’s face.
When I met Azad, who came to see me to explain how
his uncles Ari and Mahmod had been unfairly
convicted, Azad told me he had not hit the boy, the
story was exaggerated. That Asian boy, said Azad,
was a foolish drug-addict thug with a serious
attitude problem and all Azad did was tell him to
piss off. He couldn’t understand why Shno and Bekhal
were hanging around with him. The incident had
serious consequences for Bekhal, who went home to
face a family meeting in her bedroom – the four
brothers, her own father, Mahmod, among them, were
all there sitting on the bed or chairs while Bekhal
was made to sit on the floor with her mother, Behya,
next to her. Behya had to look down at the floor and
not speak unless she was spoken to, as this was the
tradition in the family. www.ekurd.net
Ari was in charge of the meeting. Bekhal would not
be cowed, and told Ari she could tell him a thing or
two about his own daughter with her piercings and
her boyfriends. Ari told her to shut up and reminded
her she was the scum here and how his own children
were worth more than her. He tapped the underside of
his feet and said the police were beneath him,
meaning he felt no fear from authority. “If your
father had listened to me, you would be ashes by
now.”
Bekhal left home some days later and did not return
for a long time, ending up in foster care. She had
been close to her brother, Bahman, and wanted to see
him, so they spoke on the phone in March 2002 and
arranged to meet at a pub car park near Mitcham
leisure centre. Bekhal was taken there by her
Jamaican boyfriend, and was careful not to kiss him
in front of her brother before he drove away.
Looking back, Bekhal says she must have been mad not
to realise anything was wrong. Bahman made her walk
in front of him and ordered her not to turn around.
He told her to stop and – bang! – he hit her on the
head with a hand-held training weight he had pulled
from his rucksack. They fought for a while, Bekhal
kicking and pushing him away until he got on his
knees and began begging her, Bekki, Bekki, please,
I’ve got to do this. You’re bringing shame
on the family. I’ve got to finish this off.
Bekhal wanted him to go away and leave her alone,
her head and face covered with blood from the
attack. She could not believe her closest ally in
the family, her brother, was trying to kill her. And
him with all his “crookedness” too, as Bekhal called
it – his Tony Montana antics.
Still, she understood the difference. The Kurds had
a saying that a woman was like a white piece of
paper being covered with black marks. The more it
was covered the more useless and worthless it
became. A man was black paper – the black marks
didn’t even show.
They sat down on nearby benches, taking a bench
each, Bahman still telling her he had to do it, had
been paid to do it by his father, and even producing
five L50 notes from his pocket and offering it to
her. Eventually Bekhal was able to get away and call
her boyfriend to collect her. She had several
stitches, and showed me the dent she still has in
her head to this day.
Bekhal’s parents were cousins. Two of her sisters
were married to relatives. “All the time you’re
growing up you’re thinking to yourself, which one is
it going to be? Which one am I going to marry?
That’s disgusting. I can never imagine myself
married to my cousin, especially in the bedroom. Oh
my God.” Bekhal made a six-page statement to the
police after the incident with Bahman, but did not
pursue it further.
While in foster care she had a care worker who acted
as a go-between with her family, and who often
reminded her how much her mother and father were
missing her and wanted to see her. One day the care
worker delivered an audio tape to Bekhal from her
parents. When she played it her father was sending
her a message in Kurdish, alternately crying and
shouting that if she didn’t come home, he would kill
her sisters and her mother and then himself, and it
would all be her fault. Her mother, Behya, could be
heard in the background; she was crying too,
pleading with her to come home.
There was evidence that Mahmod was being threatened
and abused by others in his community because he
could not control his daughters. He even went to the
police himself at one stage and reported what was
recorded as racist insults made against him by other
Iraqis. His family were not invited to a big family
gathering at the grandmother’s home.
Bekhal’s foster mother told her not to listen, but
she couldn’t help it, and played the tape over and
over. She knew how crazy her father was and how he
would do anything to defend his name, his honour and
his dignity.
She went home the next day and lasted two weeks of
walking on eggshells before it all began again – her
father hitting her, telling her she was going to end
up getting murdered. Even Banaz told Bekhal, God
man, you’ve made the atmosphere so bad, why don’t
you just go back where you came from. Bekhal left
and this time she did not return, and had only
sporadic contact with the family, hearing news from
time to time, such as the marriage of Banaz. In
2003, when she was 17, Banaz had been matched-up by
her father with a man in his thirties, Ali Abbas,
who had not long since arrived from Iraq.
When one of her sisters saw bruising on Banaz, she
first said she had slipped in the bath, which, it
later transpired, was what she had been ordered to
say by her husband. On one occasion, Banaz had
called him by his first name in the street in front
of his friends. He punched her and knocked her tooth
out, for being disrespectful.
When Banaz eventually confided to her sister that
she was being regularly assaulted and raped by her
husband, word reached her parents and – as there
were close family ties with the husband – the matter
could not be ignored. A family meeting was called
and both Banaz and her husband spoke. He said he was
only exercising his marital rights because Banaz
kept saying no to him.
It appears she was initially told to go home with
her husband and be a better wife, but around
September 2005 she returned to live with her
parents, and actually reported her husband’s
assaults to the police, though he was never charged
or prosecuted. At the same time, her GP referred her
to a psychiatrist, saying she was afraid to leave
the house as she believed she was being followed by
associates of her husband. The psychiatrist found
she was not delusional – her fear was genuine – and
although there were suggestions she had attempted
suicide, the psychiatrist assessed her as not being
suicidal.
Banaz had met Rahmat at a family function. His
family were related too, and his cousin Salah had
married Banaz’s sister Payman. Rahmat was a
charming, easy-going young Kurdish Muslim,
originally from Iran and also in the UK as an asylum
seeker. Banaz, like Bekhal, was a beautiful young
woman seeking some independence and, perhaps, some
unconditional love of the kind your parents were
supposed to provide.
They began exchanging flirty text messages and
started seeing each other in secret. Both Payman and
their mother, Behya, knew of the relationship and
kept quiet about it. When this came out later,
Payman was divorced by Salah, because she had
dishonoured him – and her family and his family – by
keeping the secret. Salah also complained that
Rahmat’s family had acted dishonourably – they had
stood by their son when he too should have been
killed.
Mahmod discovered the relationship that October. He
arranged to meet Rahmat and warned him to keep away.
There and then, while he was sitting with Mahmod,
Rahmat called Banaz and pretended to end their
relationship. She cried down the phone, I’ll never
leave you, I love you, and Rahmat let Mahmod hear
her distress: you see, this is the strength of the
feeling between your daughter and me. The police
believe it was immediately after this that Mahmod
first went to his brother Ari and said: “This bitch
is going to die.” It was mid-October 2005.
Mahmod began following his daughter, trying to
prevent her seeing Rahmat. It was never clear
exactly what the objection was to this relationship.
It was widely reported at the time that Rahmat came
from the wrong tribe, was an Iranian Kurd outside
the Mahmods’ community. But Rahmat’s cousin Salah
had married Banaz’s sister Payman. If that was all
right, what was wrong with Banaz and Rahmat being
together? Even Bekhal, when I met her, did not
understand it.
Of course, Banaz was still married, albeit
separated, but technically she was committing
adultery – the worst crime you could commit,
bringing shame to your family. Back home, and in
Iran, adulterous women could be stoned or burnt
alive, and the perpetrators protected by law.
Honour was largely about sex and moral rigidity,
and, of course, it was almost always, though not
exclusively, about the behaviour of women. After
Du’a had been buried, following her public stoning
in Iraq, her body was disinterred to check whether
her hymen was broken and whether or not she was
still a virgin – she was – as this would have had an
important bearing on innocence or guilt. If the
hymen was found to be broken, the killers would
claim justification for their actions.
Banaz and Rahmat called and texted each other as
often as they could. Some of the texts were a little
risqué, indicative of a sexual relationship between
them. Some were simply romantic – good morning, my
prince, Banaz would text Rahmat, first thing most
days.
Being shadowed by her father when she went out,
Banaz told Rahmat how she tricked him into leaving
her by telling him she had to go and buy “period
towels”, knowing her father would never dream of
doing such a thing with her.
On December 2, Banaz and Rahmat were seen kissing by
Morden Tube station. The boy who saw them – a
cousin, of course – claimed he had filmed them on
his mobile, though it now seems doubtful there ever
was any footage. It was later that day that the
family council was called at Ari’s home, where
perhaps he sat spread-eagled on the sofa as it was
agreed that Banaz and Rahmat would be killed, while
his teenage daughter Ala was upstairs, discussing it
on MSN messenger.
Ari called Banaz’s mother immediately after the
meeting and told her that the decision had been
made. She warned Banaz, who immediately called
Rahmat and told him. Banaz went to the police and
reported what her mother had told her, but when the
police called round to speak to Behya, Banaz came to
the door and changed her story, saying the phone had
been on loudspeaker and she had heard Ari herself.
Events were accelerating now, with Banaz reporting
that she was receiving nuisance calls and her
younger sister Giaband claiming she was being
followed on the way to school.
Banaz handed in a letter at Mitcham police station,
naming five men. It was in an envelope addressed to
the officer who had called to speak to her. The
letter did not reach the officer for over a week:
“Numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5 have said that they are ready
to do the job of killing me and my boyfriend. This
was said by my uncle, Ari Mahmod, while my uncle was
on the ’fone to my mum on 2nd December 2005.” This
effectively was Banaz foretelling her death.
On New Year’s Eve, Mahmod told Banaz they were going
to her grandmother’s house for a meeting to settle
her divorce from Ali. He took her phone and asked
her to carry in a suitcase from the boot of his car.
Inside he put on surgical gloves and asked her to
drink alcohol – probably brandy. Banaz became scared
and ran out, smashing a neighbour’s window with her
bare hands to get help before running on and
eventually collapsing in the doorway of a nearby
cafe.
An ambulance took her to hospital where she was
described as being so terrified they had to fetch a
security guard so she would feel safe enough to get
out of the ambulance. She was desperate to contact
Rahmat and warn him – to tell him that her father
had tried to kill her, the alcohol obviously
intended to stupefy her to make the job easier. She
had never drunk alcohol before.
The police were called and, in a terrible
misjudgment, the woman constable did not believe
Banaz and, instead of treating her as a victim,
seemed more intent on regarding her as a suspect in
a criminal-damage case. She thought the guard had
been summoned because Banaz was a danger, not
because she was at risk. The roles of the officers
who dealt with Banaz prior to her death are being
examined by the Independent Police Complaints
Commission. The commission will be bound to consider
that, had things gone differently, Banaz might still
be alive.
Rahmat arrived at the hospital and was at first
suspicious: why would Mahmod give her alcohol? Was
she just covering up some secret drinking? But he
came round and used his phone to record her on
video, describing what had happened.
Banaz went to stay with Rahmat for a couple of days,
but the family called and asked to meet. At
McDonald’s, Tooting Broadway, Mahmod apparently
begged his daughter to come home and kissed Rahmat’s
hand to thank him when it was agreed. That gesture –
the kissing of the hand – was regarded with contempt
by the wider family when they heard about it. This
was further evidence of Mahmod’s weakness. He had
failed to do the job properly on his daughter and
now he was begging and pleading.
On January 22, Rahmat was visiting friends in
Hounslow. As he was leaving, a Ford Focus pulled up
containing three of the men named on Banaz’s list of
would-be killers. They tried to get Rahmat into the
car, but he refused and his friends were there to
protect him. The car drove off after he had been
warned that they would get him another time and that
he and Banaz could not be boyfriend and girlfriend
like the English.
On January 23, Rahmat went to Kennington police
station to report the incident, while Banaz went to
Mitcham police station. The officer at the desk –
treating Banaz’s claims seriously now – tried to
persuade her not to go home and offered to help her
get into a refuge, but Banaz said she would be okay
at home as her mother would be there to protect her.
Banaz had been sleeping in the living room of her
parents’ house since returning there. She must have
slept there that night. In the morning, her parents
left early and, when her killers came, only Banaz
was in the house, along with her eldest sister, Beza,
who was there with her baby and must have stayed
upstairs out of the way while Banaz was being
murdered – after she had almost certainly been
raped. www.ekurd.net
The police do not believe Ari was in the house at
the time, but they know he was nearby and helped
drag Banaz’s body away in a suitcase, her hair and
her elbow jutting out at one stage, the handle of
the bag breaking under the strain. The police
believe it was the same suitcase – a Samsonite
American Tourister – which she had been made to
fetch from her father’s car when he tried and failed
to kill her three weeks earlier.
Rahmat knew something must have happened when he did
not hear from Banaz and could not contact her. He
reported his concerns to the police and set in
motion the inquiries that would lead to prison for
Ari, Mahmod and Mohamad Hama, a distant relative,
and one of the names on Banaz’s list. Hama killed
Banaz, allegedly with two other men, Omar Hussein
and Mohammed Ali, who fled to Kurdistan soon after
the murder.
The police would still like to bring them back to
trial, if they could.
In the aftermath of her death, a murder
investigation was soon begun, led by Detective
Inspector Caroline Goode, who described the inquiry
to me in some detail and mentioned the sleepless
nights it gave her.
At first there was no body – it had disappeared –
and the family closed ranks, starting a pattern of
lies to disguise what had really happened. Goode
liaised with Brent Hyatt, a fellow Metropolitan
Police detective inspector who had investigated one
of the first recognised honour killings in this
country, that of Heshu Yones, another Kurdish girl,
who had been killed by her father in a frenzied
assault because she had begun a relationship with a
Christian man. Abdalla Yones had tried to kill
himself after the murder, and observers wondered if
that was because he was ashamed of his daughter or
ashamed of himself.
One feature of these crimes in the UK has been the
silence that surrounds them. As Nazir Afzal, a
senior crown prosecutor told me, you might think if
it was such an important principle of honour that
the perpetrators would want to openly admit to their
crimes. But that was not the case – no honour killer
in the UK has ever admitted their crime and
explained themselves openly.
In the community, however, it is a different matter.
Hyatt told Goode they will be boasting about it, and
this turned out to be a good tip, as the police set
about making covert recordings among some of those
they suspected and – oblivious to what they were
doing – they gave themselves away.
By a further stroke of good fortune, Hama had been
involved in a car accident just before the killing
and had been given a courtesy car – a hire vehicle –
which was fitted with a GPS tracking device that
recorded his whereabouts and especially his trips to
Birmingham. Banaz had been buried there in the
Samsonite case, beneath the patio of a terraced
house on Alexandra Road in Handsworth. She was
dressed only in a pair of panties, and the shoelace
that had been used to strangle her was still around
her neck.
By the time the police got to her, in April, her
body was too decomposed to disclose any further
evidence. But from the recordings it was clear Hama
had taken pleasure in her killing – laughing as he
described it to his brother, and apparently giving
an obscenely detailed description of how he had
raped her first. Ari boasted too, and told one of
his other brothers how the original plan had been to
burn Mahmod’s house and kill everyone in it. “Omar
said, ‘I’ve only got one request, let me pour a
barrel of petrol on the house. I wouldn’t let even
one of them escape.’”
The police believe Ari was ready to kill Mahmod too,
and his whole family, to purify the shame. Mahmod
was weak, Ari kept saying. There was much talk of
the manliness of those involved. One man asked Ari –
like a hurt child, as DI Goode put it – why he had
not been asked to be involved in the killing, and
Ari told him: “You’re not a man; you’re not a man.”
In his attempts to evade the charge, Ari told his
brother he was going to say it was all Omar, who had
got cross with Banaz after she refused to marry him.
Did Omar really want to marry her, asked the
brother. No, said Ari, impatiently, we’re just
saying that.
Omar was criticised by Hama for showing fear on the
morning of the killing. Hama told everyone that Omar
had been terrified and was not a man. Someone
suggested that, perhaps, Omar had felt sorry for
Banaz, but Hama was having none of it: “No, he was
just scared.”
Hama was angry with Ari, too, for lying to him on
the morning of the murder, telling him Banaz was
already in the suitcase and all they had to do was
push it, when in fact she was still very much alive.
Ari had told him the house was empty, but the sister
Beza was still there: “They tricked us, f*** their
mothers,” Hama said. “The bitch’s soul wasn’t
getting discharged,” he told his brother. “It took
more than half an hour. Beza was upstairs. I didn’t
know she was there. Ari the bastard lied to us. The
whore.” When Hama spoke to Azad he told him, “That
girl was so low,” and Azad agreed she deserved it,
without any doubt. “A man is nothing without
honour,” Azad said to Hama.
When I met him, Azad took a different tack, and
claimed that many of the statements overheard by the
police had been misunderstood, and he insisted that
Hama and Omar had acted of their own volition, it
was nothing to do with Ari, a kind, generous man who
had only ever shown support to the family, including
Banaz.
Azad made it clear he disapproved of the men who had
killed her: “They said she [Banaz] was fornicating
but they were probably fornicating themselves.” Azad
spoke several times about fornicating. It clearly
bothered him. “In our religion,”
Azad told me, “woman is held sacred. Her dignity is
man’s dignity.”
That dignity was not much in evidence at the Old
Bailey trial earlier this year, where Ari and Mahmod
were seen to smirk and snigger in the dock as
evidence of their supposed western values and
respect for women was given in their defence. They
had pleaded not guilty, but were both convicted of
murder. Mahmod will serve at least 20 years and Ari
at least 23. Hama had already pleaded guilty and
will serve at least 17. He tried to minimise his
role in mitigation, but the judge would only concede
that the allegation he had raped Banaz was not
conclusive.
By a great irony, after it had been buried by her
killers and dug up by the police, Banaz’s body was
returned to her family for reburial. This time the
police planned to attend the funeral, both out of
respect for Banaz and to make sure the family did
the job properly this time. “I was blessed if I had
dug her out of one hole only to see her dropped down
another one,” DI Goode told me.
Ari was in prison on remand by this time, but Mahmod
was still out on bail and so took charge of the
funeral arrangements for the daughter he had
murdered.
The police were told the funeral would take place at
London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, and were on
their way there when they heard, from the undertaker
not the family, that the venue had been switched to
Tooting mosque. When they got there, it turned out
that there was no funeral arrangement and in fact
the mosque did not receive bodies, so an imam was
taken with the coffin down to Morden cemetery where
Banaz was laid to rest in the Muslim section in the
far corner.
As is traditional at Muslim services, the men who
were there filled in the grave with the soil and
then joined hands to stamp down the earth. It seemed
to the police officers standing watching that those
men were dancing on her grave.
Other honour killings
HESHU YONES, 16, was stabbed to death in London in
2002 because her father, Abdalla Yones, disapproved
of her westernised style of dress and Christian
boyfriend. In 2003, Abdalla, a Kurdish immigrant,
was sentenced to life imprisonment for her murder.
SAMAIRA NAZIR, a 25-year-old recruitment consultant,
was murdered by her brother Azhar Nazir and cousin
Imran Mohammed, after rejecting an arranged
marriage. She was strangled, stabbed 18 times, and
had her throat cut. Her two nieces, two and four at
the time, were forced to watch. Their
blood-spattered clothing was later used as evidence.
In July 2005, Azhar and Imran were sentenced to life
for Samaira’s murder.
SURJIT ATHWAL, 27, a mother of two, disappeared
after going to a wedding in India with her
mother-in-law, Bachan Athwal. Her body has never
been found, but in 2007, a court at the Old Bailey
found Athwal and her son, Sukdhave, guilty of her
murder and sentenced them both to life. The jurors
heard how Bachan, 70, ordered Surjit’s murder after
learning of an alleged affair with a colleague.
Is Islam to blame?
The UN says that around 5,000 women are victims of
honour killings every year, and as most take place
in Muslim-majority countries, it is often seen as a
Muslim practice. But are honour killings sanctioned
by the Koran? The Koran specifies the penalty of
flogging for men and women involved in unlawful
sexual intercourse. There is nothing that explicitly
sanctions the killing of errant wives or daughters.
An obsession with gender and status, and its
corollary, the assertion of masculine power through
violence, is by no means exclusively Islamic. Sikhs
in Britain and India, and Christians in the Middle
East, have also been involved in honour killings,
and dowry-murders have taken place among Hindus.
Rather than being a direct result of Islamic
teachings, these killings are really the sharp end
of a patriarchal system that crosses religious
boundaries, and in which a woman’s reproductive
potential is regarded as family property.
Dr Malise Ruthven is the author of Islam in the
World (Granta) and Fundamentalism: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford University Press)
Sundaytimes co.uk
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