When love is a crime: the horror of Britain's 'honour' killings The Age February 01 2008 By James Button THE grainy video, taken on a mobile phone and played in a British court last year, shows a young woman lying on a bed, telling how her father had tried to kill her. She says he gave her some brandy, pulled the curtains and asked her to turn around, at which point she fled the house. It sounds far-fetched, but Banaz Mahmod knew what she was talking about. Within a month, the 19-year-old was dead. 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. In London she fell in love with another man, Rahmat Sulemani, an Iranian Kurd whom 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 that the couple would be murdered.
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