Banaz Mahmod … raped and murdered for daring to chose her husband

Mahmod, an Iraqi Kurd whose family arrived in Britain as asylum seekers when she was 10, had been forced to marry a Kurdish man from the Midlands. But the marriage was a disaster and Mahmod fled to the family home in south London, saying her husband had raped her.

Back in London she fell in love with another man, Rahmat Sulemani, an Iranian Kurd who her family said was not a good enough Muslim. One day she kissed him on a street. A Kurdish bystander photographed the kiss on a mobile phone and showed it to her uncle, Ari Mahmod. He called a family meeting where it was decided the couple would be murdered.

Three months after she disappeared, Mahmod’s naked body was found in a case buried in a Birmingham backyard. The gang of young men her uncle had recruited to kill her had also raped and tortured her, and left the bootlace they used to strangle her around her neck.

Her last video, which was showed in cort.

Videotaped by her boyfriend in the Hospital

Sentencing Mahmod’s uncle, father and one of the killers to a collective 60 years in jail, the judge told them Banaz had been an admirable woman who had made one mistake: she fell in love “with an accomplished man that you and you family thought was unsuitable. So to restore your family honour you decided that she should die.” The men’s standing in their community, the judge said, had been “more important than the happiness of your flesh and blood”.

SkyNews reported this case:

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