Religious radicalism fuels UK "honour" crimes

By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) - Last year, 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod was garrotted with a shoelace in her London home before her body was stuffed in a suitcase and buried in the back garden of a house more than 150 miles away.

The killing was ordered and carried out by her father and uncle along with their associates. Her crime was simply to have fallen in love with another man after her arranged marriage fell apart because her husband had been violent.

Mahmod's brutal murder is one of a growing number of so-called "honour killings", carried out by families or communities who believe girls have brought disgrace, for example by having an affair or refusing a forced marriage.

The United Nations estimate there are 5,000 honour killings worldwide every year but the issue was almost unheard of in Britain until a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) conference in 2004.

Nazir Afzal, the CPS director who organised that conference, said the situation in Britain was worse than they had thought and that a growth in religious fundamentalism had helped make it worse.

"Even I had no idea quite frankly how serious a problem it was, how many communities were affected, how many people were affected," Afzal told Reuters.

"Murder is just the tip of the iceberg. You have a substantial number of kidnappings, false imprisonments, serious assaults, which are also carried out in the name of honour."

The CPS prosecutes about a dozen "honour" murders a year but Afzal believes the true number of killings is much higher.