Honour killings: Father, uncle, brother, killer

Hanna, a British Indian, is in a women's refuge this weekend, 100 miles from the parents and sister who have threatened to kill her as retribution for her refusal to leave her white boyfriend. Yet the 28-year-old feels anything but safe. So convinced is she that her family will seek her out there, that she has sent a detailed email account of her ordeal to police and friends "just in case things turn out for the worst".

"My dad... reminded me of an article that was in last week's press about a Muslim family honour killing - he told me to remember that he was brave enough to do anything," she tells a friend in one of the series of emails, which The Independent on Sunday has seen. "My father said that he would rather kill someone and then die himself... than have anyone shame the family in name."

Hanna's decision to produce a testimony - "just in case" - has echoes of the emotional recording made by Banaz Mahmod, a 20-year-old Kurdish woman so convinced of imminent death at her father's hands after abandoning an arranged marriage and meeting a boyfriend from the "wrong" tribe, that she recorded her fears on her boyfriend's mobile phone camera.

"It was just me and [my father] in the living room, the curtains were shut and the room was dark. He said: 'Turn your back to me'. I turned around every now and then because I didn't trust him. I didn't turn my back fully on him. I was sitting sideways to him," said Ms Mahmod - who was in hospital, recovering from wounds she suffered after smashing two windows in her grandmother's house in south London to escape from her father.

Less than a month after making the video she was strangled. The ligature - a shoelace - was still around her neck when her body was found, packed into a suitcase and buried in a pit in a back garden in Birmingham, 100 miles from her London home. On Monday, the recording helped convict her father, Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and uncle, Ari Mahmod, 50, at the end of a murder trial at the Old Bailey that had heard that a woman police officer initially concluded she was making up her story to get her boyfriend's attention.

Her sister, Bekhal, 22, who gave evidence for the prosecution, is now in hiding, fearing she too will be killed, and she wears the hijab with black veil whenever she leaves home.

It is a murder that has thrown the spotlight back on to so-called "honour killings" - a crime the extent of which remains unclear. The United Nations suggests that 5,000 women a year die worldwide - that is equivalent to 13 a day. In Britain, police put the rate at one a month.

But support groups believe the true figure is much higher, and rising. They point to the suicide rate among Asian women aged 16-24, which is three times the national average, and believe many of those are driven to kill themselves either in shame or in fear .

This is a murder, too, that raises uncomfortable questions about the police's ability to grasp the threat posed to women in such cases and how to operate in what is a cultural minefield. There was a drive five years ago to protect such vulnerable young women, but many of the measures recommended have not been implemented.

Ms Mahmod's ordeal began when she left an arranged marriage punctuated by beatings and sexual violence and met Rahmat Sulemani, a Kurd who did not come from the same Mirawdaly group of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan as her own family. Neither was he a strict Muslim.

Between 4 December 2005 and 23 January 2006, Ms Mahmod wrote four times to the Metropolitan Police, describing threats she had faced. She even listed the men she thought would try and kill her. The night before she died, she went to the police. Fatefully, she refused the offer of a safe house.

PC Angela Cornes, who responded to the call when Ms Mahmod escaped from her father on New Year's Eve 2005 and ran into a restaurant, thought her a drunk attention-seeker. Her father had plied her with brandy, the first time she had ever had alcohol. PC Cornes even considered charging Ms Mahmod for criminal damage for the two broken windows.

But the Met's gravest error may have been twice to approach Ms Mahmod's mother and to speak to both her parents after that incident. Police guidelines on such investigations stipulate families should not be approached, for fear of placing a complainant in more danger.

Little wonder, then, that one Met officer said the initial handling of the case had set back by 25 years the Met's efforts to encourage potential victims of such crimes to come forward.

Diana Nammi, founder of Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, a group that provides shelter to women who fear their lives may be in danger, said: "I'm very angry with the police. They could have saved her. Other women are not going to be encouraged to seek help when you look at what happened with Banaz."

Nazir Afzal, a Crown Prosecution Service director, admits there is a gap between those who are trained in dealing with such cases and the officers who work on the frontline. "Banaz's death does illustrate the need for more consistency," he said.

Commander Steve Allen of the Metropolitan Police agrees. "There are 130,000 police officers nationally, and the challenge is to have consistency."

Though a two-page honour crimes briefing paper was re-circulated in a ninth, updated version to frontline officers last October, a formal national training package for police will not be available until next year - five years after a strategy to deal with such crimes included recommendations for training all officers.

Jasvinder Sanghera, director of Karma Nirvana, a women's project in Derby that has been involved in national consultation on the issue, claims that the momentum established three years ago, when a reinvestigation of 122 historic "honour" killing cases was announced, has not been maintained. Ms Sanghera sees 14 victims of "honour" crimes or forced marriages a week - the two are often linked - and says at least two will say they have had a poor police response.

"It will often be a breach of confidentiality, where police will go straight to a family, or it will be officers concluding this is just some kind of tiff," she said. "For some officers, they just find it too complicated."

The first Met review of the way "honour" killings were dealt with began after the murder on 12 October 2002 of Heshu Yones, 16, from west London, stabbed at the family home for being "westernised" and having "sullied the family name" by having a Lebanese Christian boyfriend. She ran from room to room for 15 minutes until her father, Abdalla Yones, cornered her in a toilet, slit her throat and stabbed her 19 times.

In 2003 he became the first person to be convicted of an "honour" killing in Britain but, to the dismay of officers who convicted him, his tariff was reduced from 20 years to 14 by citing "irreconcilable cultural differences between the Kurdish and Western societies". The Law Commission has since stepped in to prevent such a defence being used to reduce a sentence.

Victims have included Rukhsana Naz, 19, murdered by her mother and brother while seven months pregnant, and Samaira Nazir, 25, murdered by her 16-year-old cousin for wanting to marry her Afghan boyfriend - younger members of a family are often selected to undertake the murder, on the basis that they may get shorter prison sentences.

The youngest victim was six-year-old Alisha Begum, who died when her home in Birmingham was set on fire by arsonists who disapproved of a relationship her older brother was having with a teenager.

Some women, who cannot summon the strength to leave the family home, choose to commit suicide instead - a fact recognised in a recent legal judgment which ruled that driving someone to commit suicide in such cases does constitute an abuse. Detectives have always been baffled by the case of Nabeala Hussain, 23, who killed herself and her children by setting fire to their family car in Middlesbrough four years ago. The woman's family steadfastly refused to cooperate with Teesside Police. The CPS is currently asking all coroners to notify it of all cases that may fall into this category.

The CPS has established London, West Yorkshire, West Midlands and Lancashire as pilot areas for the purge on the crime, for which it now has 20 specialist prosecutors, and over the last year, the CPS has also been attempting to build up a profile of killers and issue advice to police that will make it easier for them to tackle the issue.

The reopening of 122 cases in 2004 has been vital in that respect. Included was the murder of Sahjda Bibi, 22, who was stabbed 22 times by a distant relative minutes before her wedding on 16 October 2003. The vagueness of the motive behind Ms Bibi's killing has baffled investigators. "We are curious to know what triggered the extreme step," said Mr Afzal. "Sahjda was so distantly related to her killer that it is hard to believe his honour could, in any way, be affected by her actions. Yet he killed her in the name of honour. We are revisiting such complex cases."

And still the plight facing those like Hanna goes on. The support group working with her describes months of frustration attempting to persuade local police that she should be granted a form of witness protection, which would enable her to change her identity, address, national insurance number and start her life again. "It's easier for those women who are willing for the police to bring charges against their families to get witness protection," said the agency. "But since the very act of telling someone what has gone on is a crime of 'dishonour' in a family's eyes, many girls don't want that and then struggle to get the protection they need."

Commander Allen acknowledged that more work is needed to help women in this position. "It's an area where there's still not a huge amount of experience," he said. "We do need to be as imaginative as we can and need to be aware of the lengths to which families will go." Mr Afzal agrees - he likens "honour" crime to organised crime, suggesting families often bring huge resources to the hunt.

Hanna's emails detail the consequences of being found. "My father had his hand around my throat and then punched me on the left side of my face and then my sister scratched my face, pulled my hair and kicked me," she writes. "I curled up in a ball to try not to get hurt. I think it was instinct."

Hanna is safe for now. But the questions facing her and those like her are: for how long, and what next?

Further reading: 'The Honour Killings' by Sita Lazenby is a novel charting the plight of three Muslim women in Pakistan