KEY POINTS:
Banaz Mahmod made no secret of her belief that her father wanted to kill her.
She was in hospital, nursing wounds incurred in an escape from him, when her boyfriend recorded a video of her on his mobile phone, in December 2005.
"It was just me and him
in the living room. I turned around every now and then because I didn't trust him," she told the camera.
Banaz also told police - four times - that she feared for her life and produced a list of three men she believed would murder her, but all to no avail. Less than a month after making the video she was strangled to death.
Her body was packed into a suitcase and driven 160km north to Birmingham where she was buried in a back garden with the ligature - a shoelace - still around her neck.
Yesterday, after a three-month Old Bailey trial, her father, Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, both from south London, were convicted of murdering her. Mohamad Hama, 30, of south London, an associate of Ari Mahmod, had already pleaded guilty to the murder.
Campaigners demanded an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation into why Banaz, 20, died.
It emerged during the trial that a female police officer concluded Banaz had made up her story to get her boyfriend's attention.
Constable Angela Cornes, one of a number of officers facing an investigation by Scotland Yard's directorate of professional standards, said she had been instructed by a detective inspector, Caroline Goode, to doctor evidence to present the investigation in a better light.
The campaign of intimidation against Banaz Mahmod began when she met the man who was to become her boyfriend, Rahmat Sulemani, after fleeing an abusive, two-year arranged marriage which had been punctuated by beatings and sexual violence. She had to keep her relationship quiet because Sulemani did not come from the same Mirawdaly group of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan where her family originated.
When word got back to Ari Mahmod, a "controlling, powerful" man, that the couple had been seen out together, a family "council of war" was held. But the decision about what to do had apparently already been taken. A day before, Ari telephoned Amir Abbas Ibrahim, an associate in Birmingham, to arrange for the burial of Banaz's body. Ibrahim has now fled Britain.
Mahmod Mahmod tried to kill his daughter first on New Year's Eve 2005, when he lured her to her grandmother's house and forced her to drink brandy, but she ran away.
Afterwards she collapsed and was taken to hospital. She refused to leave the ambulance at first, insisting her father was trying to kill her and, once in hospital, made the recorded message. Asked to investigate, Cornes was more concerned with a window broken as Banaz escaped and wanted to lay criminal damage charges.
Banaz soon returned to her family and pretended she was no longer seeing Sulemani, but they were spotted together in Brixton, south London. Within hours, a group of men approached Sulemani and tried to lure him into a car, but he refused, and told his girlfriend about it.
A woman police officer tried to persuade her to stay in a safe house but Banaz thought she would be safe at home because her mother was there. The next day her parents went out, leaving men to come to the family home and murder her.
Sulemani, 29, who has had to move home and live under an assumed name, said that he had had to harass police officers to make them believe Banaz had gone missing.
During the trial, Goode said other officers blamed Cornes for the death. A campaign group, the Southall Black Sisters, has demanded the Independent Police Complaints Commission investigate. It says it has been monitoring the case but has not been asked to investigate.
- INDEPENDENT
