Honor Killing: Where is she!

The Times
October 22, 2009

Tell me what you did with her, demands 'honour killing' mother
 
David Brown


A mother shouted across a courtroom yesterday to demand that her husband reveal what happened to the schoolgirl daughter he is alleged to have murdered in an “honour killing”.


Hanim Goren was giving evidence for the prosecution at the Old Bailey about how their 15-year-old daughter, Tulay, disappeared ten years ago.

The housewife turned to her husband, Mehmet Goren, who was sitting in the dock ten metres away, and shouted: “Look at my face. What did you do to Tulay? Say it so that I can . . .”

She added later: “It was Mehmet who disappeared Tulay. I am sure of that.”

Mr Goren, 45, is accused of murdering his daughter to protect his family honour after she ran away to live with a boyfriend twice her age. He is alleged to have buried her in the garden of the family home in Woodford Green, North London, before removing the body several days later.

Mrs Goren, 45, said that when she questioned her husband about Tulay’s disappearance he would reply: “I don’t know anything. Those who have done it are ‘over there’.”

“I don’t know who he meant,” she told the court.

Mrs Goren said she found that Tulay had disappeared when she returned home after being ordered to spend the night with the family of her brother-in-law, Cuma Goren, 42. She told the court that her husband said he had disowned their eldest daughter, that she had gone and that in future they would have only three children, not four.

“When Mehmet was in the house Tulay’s name was not mentioned,” Mrs Goren told the jury. “Everything that belonged to Tulay was torn — photos, even her Turkish identity card, her birth certificate. He said there will not be anything left inside belonging to Tulay.”

Mrs Goren said that she kept asking her husband what had happened to their daughter.

“I was saying to him, ‘You swallowed Tulay’. I was saying, ‘She is alive in your tummy’,” Mrs Goren said. “During the last few years I started saying it more.”

[if this were not so sad, it reminds me of Fat Bastard ... although in this case, the bastard is in prison - he should be executed if there was justice in England.]

Mrs Goren said that a letter that appeared to have been written by Tulay was delivered to the family home the morning after her husband attacked her daughter’s boyfriend, Hilal Unal, with an axe. In the letter the girl claimed to be held captive by her lover’s boss.

Mrs Goren said that she did not initially tell the truth to the police about Tulay because her husband threatened to tell them that she was responsible for her daughter’s disappearance. “He used to say to me if I went to the police, ‘I would go and tell them you did it with your relatives, your brothers, that we did it together’,” she told the court.



Mrs Goren said that she admitted lying to police in her initial accounts of Tulay’s disappearance but told the truth after she was arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice and murder. She was released without charge. She told the court that Tulay had run away to live with Mr Unal after her husband and his brother Cuma had beaten her when they discovered the relationship.

Mrs Goren, who has broken a ten-year silence to give evidence at the Old Bailey, has described finding her teenage daughter tied up by her husband on a bedroom floor the day before the schoolgirl was allegedly murdered.

She said that Tulay’s hands and feet had turned purple because they were bound so tightly with parts of a torn shawl.

Mehmet Goren and his brothers Ali, 55, and Cuma, both of Walthamstow, East London, deny murdering Tulay. They also deny conspiracy to murder Mr Unal.

The trial continues.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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