Murder in the Name of Honor (23 page)

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 prosecution 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.
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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.

In May 2007, nineteen-year-old Shawbo Ali Rauf was taken from her home in Birmingham to Iraqi Kurdistan where she was stoned to death. Her crime was having unknown numbers on her
mobile telephone – which proved to her family that she was having an affair. The British police refused to prosecute her husband, despite protests carried out by Kurdish women's groups.
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There are no figures that state how many of the young women that disappear from the UK are murdered. We don't even know how many British girls are bundled off to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh each year, but according to Jasvinder Sanghera, writing in
The Times
, the figure is in the thousands. ‘Some three hundred girls aged thirteen to sixteen have disappeared off the school registers in Bedford alone,' she wrote, ‘so many of these girls are intimidated or subjected to actual violence as they try to resist their parents' wishes.'

There may be many other reasons for an honour killing. A twenty-seven-year-old Sikh woman fled her marital home because she feared that her in-laws were planning to kill her for failing to produce a child. She had passed fertility tests but still had fertility treatment forced upon her. She suspected that her husband was infertile and it was this that had sealed her fate.

A more typical British victim was Samaira Nazir, a twenty-five-year-old businesswoman and graduate of Pakistani origin. In April 2005, after refusing to marry a series of potential husbands, and embarking on a relationship with an Afghan asylum seeker, she was summoned to the family home. After an argument, her brother, her father and her seventeen-year-old cousin cut her throat and stabbed her seventeen times.

Nazir's father was bailed and he seized the opportunity to flee to Pakistan. He's still at large and unlikely to face British justice any time soon as there's no extradition treaty between the UK and Pakistan. Thankfully, Samaira's brother and cousin were both convicted of murder.
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In 1998, Bachan Athwal, a Sikh grandmother, arranged for her family to murder Surjit Athwal, her twenty-seven-year-old daughter-in-law. Surjit, a mother of two, was a customs officer at
Heathrow airport. She was having an affair and was planning to divorce Bachan's son, to whom she had been married for ten years – the result of a parental arrangement.

Soon after hearing this news, Bachan convinced her son Sukhdave, aged forty-five, that Surjit should die for shaming him – not only for having an affair but because she cut her hair short, smoked and consumed alcohol. Surjit was lured to India under the pretext of a ‘family wedding'. Her husband, who remarried after she ‘failed' to return from India, took out a £100,000 insurance policy on Surjit the day she left.

After the murder, Bachan boasted to her family that her daughter-in-law's body had been thrown into a river. Bachan and her son sent forged letters in an attempt to fool the police into thinking that Surjit had eloped with another man.

That the case was investigated at all was largely thanks to Surjit's brother, Jagdeesh Singh, who spearheaded a campaign to get his sister the justice she deserved. He learned of his sister's murder from two relatives while on a visit to India. ‘She was driven off in a car and taken to the banks of a nearby river,' he said. ‘She was pulled out of the car, strangled, suffocated to death and then her body was thrown into the river with a view to it being lost for ever.'

The police travelled to India to investigate but drew a blank; a reward of £10,000 failed to persuade anyone to come forward.

‘With the greatest of respect to them,' Jagdeesh said, ‘all the leading police investigators at the beginning were white, English officers who did not quite appreciate the subtleties and the unseen aspects of honour violence, the details around honour and family and practices within a Punjabi family culture.'

Singh also criticized the British Foreign Ministry for failing to exert pressure on the Indian government to intensify its investigations. He also made the point that a white British woman who vanished in Japan during the same period received a great deal of attention, not only from the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook (who
refused to meet Jagdeesh Singh and his family) but also from Prime Minister Tony Blair. It wasn't until 2003, when Singh finally met the new Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, that the government promised to make a serious effort to catch the murderers and in 2007, nine years after the crime, Bachan and Sukhdave Athwal were tried at the Old Bailey.

Surjit's seventy-year-old mother-in-law claimed she was innocent throughout the trial and wept as she was sentenced to life. Judge Giles Forrester told the pair:

How you could commit this unspeakable act I do not know. There was no motive worthy of the name. You did it because you perceived she had brought shame on the family name.

In reality you murdered her for no better reason than the existence of matrimonial difficulties and the likely breakdown of the marriage. You decided the so-called honour of your family name was worth more than the life of this young woman.
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Surjit's daughter, Pavan, did not learn the truth about what had happened until August 2008, when she turned seventeen. She had accepted that her grandmother and father had been mistakenly convicted and that her mother had simply abandoned her. Her family hid newspaper reports from her and she even visited her father in Belmarsh Prison while trying to keep up with her schoolwork and looking after her younger brother.

In her first interview, reported in the
Independent
, Pavan said:

For years I was told that my mum didn't love us any more and that we should just forget about her. My brother and I grew up hating her because we thought she'd just left us; why would we doubt our dad?

But after I moved out of my uncle's house in April, they started to threaten me with violence and I began to realize what
they were capable of. My aunt Sarbjit told me everything that had happened but it was when I read my mum's diary that it really hit me. I felt terrible. I was so angry at my dad for telling such terrible lies but I also felt guilty. I wanted to tell my mum that I was sorry for hating her all these years. We used to have so much fun together, even though I know now that she was really unhappy.
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Her ten-year-old brother was placed in foster care by the authorities after Pavan found out the truth. ‘It's such a relief to know that my brother is safe,' Pavan told the
Independent
. ‘It feels like a huge pressure has been lifted from my shoulders. I know telling him the truth is going to be a huge hurdle but I can't wait to see him again and start living our lives without all the lies.'

In December 2008, Pavan organized a memorial service at Heathrow airport (where her mother used to work) to mark the tenth anniversary of her mother's death. She is now waging a campaign to raise £10,000 to bring the Punjab-based killers of her mother to justice.

Sometimes, so-called honour killings can spark violent reprisals – perhaps as the result of the fear that the police are unlikely to bring the perpetrators to justice. In 1999 Haq Nawaz Khan from Walsall shot dead his half-brother ‘Big Ali' Nawaz Khan. The two men had been close until Big Ali had shot dead Haq's sister, Shanaz Begum, in Pakistan five months earlier in an honour killing.

On 23 September 2005, Mohammad Shaheen, the co-owner of a taxi firm in Chorlton, Manchester, was shot dead by Khyber Khan, his brother-in-law. Khan, aged twenty-eight, had flown to Manchester from Pakistan to kill Shaheen after his sisters told him that he'd sexually assaulted them. After the killing, Khan's sisters helped him flee the country. He was eventually arrested in Canada and deported to the UK.
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Sometimes, children are also murdered, intentionally or unintentionally, as the result of an alleged affront to the family honour. On 2 November 2006, one of the most horrific incidents ever seen in the UK took place in Accrington, Lancashire.

Mohammad Riaz was an immigrant from Pakistan's highly conservative North-West Frontier. He had arrived in the UK at the age of thirty-two after his cousin, Caneze, was sent from the UK to Pakistan to marry him. They had four children together, three girls and a boy.

Thirty-nine-year-old Caneze was confident and successful and was described by her friends as bright and bubbly; she worked as a campaigner for women's rights, helping women who felt suppressed by traditional values, and regarded herself as a role model. Caneze, whose mother was English, was highly sociable; she organized women-only swimming groups and had a wide circle of friends. Mohammad, meanwhile, was illiterate, spoke no English, undertook a wide variety of low-paid jobs and spent most of his spare time in the local mosque.

When Caneze's father died, Mohammad tried to exert his patriarchal authority. He criticized the western dress of his wife and children, and demanded that their daughters finish their schooling as soon as possible so they could be married off in Pakistan. Caneze refused, and also refused to give up work. Mohammad was incensed. Then in 2006 Adam, their seventeen-year-old son, developed leukaemia. This failure of Mohammad to produce a healthy son only added to his rage; the final straw came when his eldest daughter told him she wanted to become a fashion designer.

On 31 October 2006, Mohammad, who had been drinking heavily, locked the doors and windows of the family home, sprayed the rooms with petrol and set it alight. Once the fire had taken hold, he poured petrol on himself and stepped into the flames. Caneze and their four daughters, aged sixteen, fifteen, ten and three, all died. Mohammad was pulled alive from the burning
building by firefighters but died two days later. Adam was in hospital at the time, receiving chemotherapy. He died six weeks after being given the news.
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