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Du'a Khalil Aswad
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You are here: Home › News › 'Honour killing' sister breaks her silence
Britain: 'Honour killing' sister breaks her silence
People Britain was appalled by the horrific 'honour killing' of a girl murdered by her father for daring to kiss the man she loved.
Here, her sister, who narrowly escaped death herself and now lives in fear of her life, breaks her silence.
Every time Bekhal Mahmod leaves the safety of her home, she wears the hijab with a black veil covering her face - even though she would give anything for the freedom not to have to.
She has no family to turn to, few friends, and has to lie to new acquaintances about who she is and where she is from. She is constantly looking over her shoulder.
"My life will always be at risk," says 22-year-old Bekhal. "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. I wear the veil so no one can recognise me."
It is a desperately lonely and isolated existence, but at least she is alive - unlike her younger sister Banaz.
Both young women brought "shame" on their strict Muslim Iraqi Kurdish family by disobeying their father Mahmod.
Bekhal, 22, ran away aged 16 rather than agree to an arranged marriage to a cousin in Iraq.
She survived an attempted killing by her brother, but her sister Banaz, 20, paid the ultimate price for leaving her own arranged marriage and then falling in love with an "unsuitable man" of her own choice.
On the orders of her 52-year-old father and uncle, Ari Mahmod, 50, she was strangled with a bootlace by Kurdish assassins, her body stuffed in a suitcase and buried six feet down in the garden of a house belonging to an associate in Birmingham.
Two of the murderers, who fled back to Iraq after this horrific so-called "honour killing", have since boasted of raping Banaz before she died in January 2006.
"Honour killing?" cries Bekhal. "Where is the honour in a father putting his status in the community before the life of his own flesh and blood?
"They should be disgusted with themselves. Honour in our community is about men having the upper hand, having the ruling power.
"Banaz was the most beautiful, loving, caring, easy-going girl 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?
"After I refused an arranged marriage, I knew I had two choices; stay and be killed, or leave and live. I chose to live but I had to leave everything behind."
Bekhal was one of the key prosecution witnesses at the three-month trial of her father and uncle, which this week resulted in their convictions at the Old Bailey for murder.
They have yet to be sentenced. A third man, Mohamad Hama, 30, of South Norwood, London, had already admitted the killing.
The other key witness was Banaz's boyfriend Rahmat Sulemani, 29, whose own life was threatened because he was considered an unsuitable match for Banaz, despite also being Iraqi.
Bekhal and Rahmat now face a future of secret addresses and identities under police protection.
"When I stared into the eyes of my father in court, there wasn't even a twitch of guilt," says Bekhal. "No emotion at all. I still love him because he is my father, but I can never forgive nor understand what he did.
"Why, if he didn't want us to be influenced by Western ways, did he bring us to Britain? You cannot expect your children to follow the same traditions as back in Iraq.
"It is an impossible expectation. This would never have happened back there because we would have known no different."
Bekhal has shown incredible bravery in giving evidence against her father and speaking out now in her first major interview, for the threat of reprisals is very real.
She is believed by British police to be the first female family member ever to give evidence in an "honour killing" trial.
Indeed, her mother and three other sisters refused to cooperate with the police for fear of upsetting the community.
"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 says.
For it seems that it is women who are the main casualties when some ultra-traditional immigrants are determined to protect their own culture, even if it means operating above the law.
According to Bekhal, integration was the very last thing on her father's mind, although she says he seemed happy to accept Britain's hospitality in the form of a council house and benefits.
Despite being relatively well-off back in Iraq - his family were property owners and ran various businesses - he never worked here. His status in the community and the respect of Iraqi Kurds were all that mattered to him.
Bekhal was 14 and Banaz 12 when they first arrived in England, as asylum seekers fleeing Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with their parents Mahmod and Behya, brother Bahman, now aged 28, and sisters Beza, 25, Payman, 20, and Giaband, 16.
Having moved into a council house in Mitcham, South London, Mahmod's daughters, who couldn't speak a word of English, were enrolled at the local Bishopsford Community School.
Inevitably problems started almost immediately as Bekhal began to learn the language and made friends with Western boys and girls.
She started to envy their freedoms, to the evident fury of her father. The more Westernised his daughters tried to become, the more he tried to control them, often resorting to verbal abuse and violence.
"We used to have to wear a headscarf and trousers to school, which was so hot," Bekhal recalls. "I didn't want to wear mini-skirts or makeup like some of the girls, but I longed to take my headscarf off.
"One day I was walking home through the park and I'd taken my scarf off and my father saw me. He screamed at me: 'Who do you think you are? You are acting like a bitch.'
"He pulled me inside the house, spat in my face and then picked up his slippers to beat me around the head as he shouted: 'Don't you ever disobey me.' In the two years before I ran away, I think he beat me more than 20 times.
"It would be over silly things like undoing the top button of my school shirt, or using hair gel. Once, he picked up a metal soup ladle and hit me round the head repeatedly with it.
"I didn't want to have boyfriends or go out at night or anything like that. I was respectful to my parents.
"I just wanted to be able to have friends, to give my opinion, very small things that British girls take for granted."
Bekhal left school after taking her GCSEs and took a part-time job working in a supermarket. All her earnings - around £300 a month - were taken by her father; she was given just £50 from it.
"One day I was walking home from work and a male colleague was walking beside me, pushing his bike along," she says.
"All of a sudden my father drove up. My friend leapt on his bike to cycle off and my father tried to run him over. Back home after that I was beaten again.
"When I used to confide in friends what was happening to me, they used to accuse me of exaggerating.
"They couldn't believe that such things could go on in today's society. They thought there were laws to prevent it, but they do happen and there are many other women still suffering.
"It is not a cultural issue. It is criminal and people need to take it seriously."
Bekhal first ran away when she was 16 and went to live with a schoolfriend. Her parents tracked her down and after countless threats she reluctantly agreed to return home.
The second time, she ran away after she was locked for a week in a bedroom for refusing to accept an arranged marriage with a cousin, calling the police to rescue her after escaping her confines while the rest of the family were out.
She was placed in foster care by social services, but again, reluctantly went home after a few months.
"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."
The beatings continued, as did the demands that she agree to marry her cousin. "I kept repeating 'I will not do it'. I could not agree to marry some stranger and live an unhappy life."
It was when Bekhal ran away for a third time -returning to her foster mother - and found herself a Muslim boyfriend, who was not strict in his religion, that Mahmod decided he could not allow her to live.
During Banaz's murder trial, the court heard how Mahmod dispatched his only son Bahman to restore the family's honour by killing Bekhal.
Bekhal recalls how her brother lured her to meet him at a remote spot in South London, with promises of money, and then hit her round the head with a dumb-bell while her back was turned.
"I felt this terrible pain in my head and collapsed," recalls Bekhal. "Blood was streaming down my face.
"I felt dizzy and sick, but I looked up at him and said: 'What are you doing?' He was crying like a baby and kept repeating: 'I've got to do it, you have brought shame on the family. It is my duty.'
"As he started to drag me across the gravel I was pleading: 'Please don't do this, I will do anything, just tell my father you killed me and let me go, you will never hear from me again.'
"Thankfully for me, he couldn't go through with it. He put his hand in his pocket and gave me six £50 notes before telling me to go. I phoned my boyfriend, screaming hysterically: 'Please come and get me, my brother's trying to kill me.'
Bekhal was taken to hospital where she received several stitches to her head, but she refused to inform the police or press charges, because - despite herself - she didn't want to shame her family by involving the authorities.
From then on, she occasionally phoned her sisters in secret, careful not to tell them where she was living.
Some months later, she learned that her younger sister Banaz, unlike her, had agreed to an arranged marriage when she was 17 to a Midlandsbased Kurdish man, then aged 28, whom her father described as "the David Beckham" of husbands.
But the marriage was a disaster. Banaz, the court would later hear, fled home after two-and-a-half years complaining that her husband was violent, regularly beating her.
"I remember going to see Banaz in secret when she was married and she was terribly unhappy," Bekhal recalls.
"She finally understood why I had run away. I told her she could come and live with me, but she said she couldn't bring further shame on the family. She later told me she only put up with her husband for so long because she wanted to keep our father happy."
What a bitter irony that this young girl continued to try to please the man who would later take her life.
Back home with her family, Banaz was not yet divorced when she met Rahmat Sulemani, from South London, at a family party in 2005.
For a long time they were just good friends before falling in love, but Mahmod did not approve.
Rahmat - despite being a family friend - was not from the same village and not as religious as the Mahmods. He was warned off with threats to his life.
Banaz, 20, was taken to a relative's house in Sheffield, where she was locked up for two weeks and beaten.
When that did not work, a family meeting was called by Banaz's uncle, Ari Mahmod, a wealthy entrepreneur who ran a money transfer business, where it was decided to kill the couple unless they stopped seeing each other.
But Banaz and Rahmat, whose occupation has never been revealed to protect him, and who now lives under an assumed name, continued to meet in secret.
Their fate was sealed when a member of the Kurdish community pictured them kissing in the street in Brixton on his mobile phone.
The first attempt on Banaz's life was on New Year's Eve 2005, when she was taken to her grandmother's house in Wimbledon and plied with brandy by her father, who then came towards her, arms outstretched wearing surgical gloves, as she fought off sleep.
She ran out through the back door when her father briefly left the room, and broke a neighbour's window to try to raise the alarm, cutting her wrists in the process.
The police were called, but the female officer who interviewed her, PC Angela Cornes, didn't believe her. She dismissed Banaz as an attention seeker and even considered charging her with criminal damage for breaking the window.
It was left to Banaz's boyfriend Rahmat to record on his camera phone her chilling testimony, explaining - as she lay in hospital - what had happened and describing how she was "really scared" for her life.
This was played to the jury during the murder trial.
PC Cornes is one of five police officers under investigation in an internal review by Scotland Yard over the handling of the case, for it emerged during the trial that Banaz had told police on at least four occasions that her family was plotting to kill her.
Yet, crucially, she declined the police offer of a place at a refuge, believing no harm would come to her while at home with her mother.
Mahmod never reported his daughter missing to police after she suddenly vanished in January 2006. It was left to Rahmat Sulemani to do that.
When the police first called at the family home on the day she was murdered - January 24 - Mahmod fobbed them off, saying she was out.
Two days later they classed her as high-risk after the family refused to report her missing and launched a full-scale investigation.
Bekhal describes the day she was told by police that her sister's body had been found buried half-naked in a garden - three months after her death - as the very worst of her life.
"What they did to my sister was devilish, despicable and disgusting. Can a family's honour be worth more than a life? I can't bear to think of the way she must have suffered. I had no choice but to stand up in court and give evidence for her."
Today, Bekhal has no contact with her mother, brother or sisters. She cannot risk any communication, in case her new whereabouts under police protection is inadvertently revealed.
More importantly, however, she does not want to put them at risk from the Kurdish community for associating with her.
"I would rather live like this than live in fear," says Bekhal. "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."
