In yesterday’s mail we told how detective Caroline Goode — soon to be played by Keeley Hawes in a TV drama — solved the brutal ‘honour killing’ of Banaz Mahmod, 20, by her own father and uncle. Today, concluding our two-part series, we reveal how she brought the rest of the killers to justice…
At the Old Bailey, the judge didn’t mince his words as he handed down life sentences to the men in the dock.
‘This was a barbaric and callous crime,’ he told brothers Mahmod Mahmod and Ari Mahmod, leading figures in the Muslim Kurdish community in South London.
‘You are hard and unswerving men to whom the respect of your community is more important than your own flesh and blood.’
After a four-month trial, a jury had convicted the pair of the brutal murder of Banaz, Mahmod’s 20-year-old daughter, for supposedly shaming the strictly patriarchal family.
Banaz Mahmoud was brutally murdered by her father and uncle and buried in a suitcase
She had left her arranged marriage because her husband allegedly beat and raped her, and had found love with a new boyfriend.
She was brutally sexually assaulted and throttled to death in the living room of her own home, her body secretly buried in the overgrown garden of a terrace house in Birmingham.
It had taken all the skills and determination of Metropolitan Police homicide officer Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Goode, and her team, to turn a routine missing persons inquiry into a murder hunt that unmasked the existence in Britain of so-called ‘honour killings’.
Horrifyingly, these occur all too frequently in certain backward-looking, rigidly patriarchal sectors of society, where tyrannical men rule the roost and women are expected to conform without question or face social ostracism, public shaming and even death.
Goode had got her men in the end, but only after breaking through a wall of silence in a community that had tried to conceal the crime and protect those who conspired to carry it out.
Ari Mahmod had taken charge and organised it.
Also sentenced to life in prison was the man who actually carried out the killing, a vicious thug by the name of Mohammed Hama, a part-time butcher by trade.
While in custody he had been taped boasting about how he had sexually violated Banaz before slipping a cord round her neck and choking her to death. He stamped on her head to finish her off.
The worry for Goode was that this damning evidence would be ruled inadmissible in court, and that she would not be able to get a conviction without it.
Mohammed Ali (left) and Omar Hussain who were jailed for life for the ‘honour killing’ of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod in January 2006 after she left her violent husband for another man
In the event, Hama pleaded guilty. But the Mahmod brothers pleaded not guilty. There was a mass of circumstantial evidence linking them to the murder, but what clinched their conviction was recorded private conversations with their families and each other.
In these, Ari expressed his fury at his niece and his insistence that she had to die. The brothers also concocted false alibis for the day of her death.
Thankfully, at the beginning of trial, the judge did rule the conversations admissible. In court, the men dismissed the charges as unfounded and presented themselves as a kind father and uncle, not controlling at all.
But their stories unravelled as tapes of their conversations showed the opposite.
Under cross-examination, their defence crumbled as their true, violent, domineering attitudes were revealed.
DCI Caroline Goode, the detective who led the investigation into Banaz Mahmod’s ‘honour killing’, stands outside New Scotland Yard, London received the Queen’s Police Medal
They trotted out any old story, however implausible.
At one point, Ari — an arrogant man always trying to prove himself cleverer than anyone else — tried to con the jury that his talk about arranging a killing related to the sacrifice of a goat for a religious festival, not his niece.
But for Goode, even worse than their pathetic excuses was the way witness after witness — ‘cronies’, she called them — was wheeled in to give dodgy evidence supposedly exonerating the brothers.
In another ploy to pull the wool over the jury’s eyes, Ari’s own daughter turned up in court to declare that her father was a loving, liberal chap who wouldn’t hurt a fly. But two extraordinarily brave souls came forward to tell the truth.
One was Rahmat Suleimani, the Kurdish man with whom Banaz had formed a relationship after leaving her husband.
Rahmat, too, was in danger, and attempts had been made to abduct and kill him.
Giving evidence to the court, he cried as he described his deep feelings for Banaz: ‘She was my love, my future, the sweetest person in the world.
She meant the world to me.’ In the dock Mahmod and Ari could be seen sneering at what they perceived as his lack of manliness.
The other witness who spoke out was Banaz’s elder sister, Bekhal — though she was so terrified of her father and uncle that she gave evidence from behind a screen.
Her account of how she was beaten by her father and had to be taken into care gave the lie to Mahmod’s claims to be a loving parent.
She knew the consequence of defying her family.
She told the jury: ‘I’m going to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.’ But who would the jury believe?
Goode was anxious as she waited for the verdict — there was a lot at stake.
‘The outcome could affect the lives of hundreds of women across the UK,’ she writes.
‘What had happened to a beautiful, innocent young woman was an evil crime, a terrible betrayal and an offence to every value I hold dear.
‘If we were to fail, it would reinforce a widely held view that the police do not care about ethnic minority communities, and that the men who rule some of them are invincible.
‘If we were to succeed, though, it would send a clear message that the police do understand these issues, that we do have the ability to keep our witnesses safe and the capability and commitment to bring offenders to justice.’
To Goode’s relief, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on both Mahmod brothers.
She was elated: ‘They hadn’t got away with it. We had achieved justice for Banaz.’ But even with them serving life sentences, there was a loose end that kept her awake at night.
Two others who’d carried out the killing with Hama — Omar Hussain and Mohammed Ali — had fled the country and were now living in Iraqi Kurdistan.
There, they had been seen in cafes boasting about what they had done and how they had got away with it.
‘I was incensed,’ she writes.
‘Those men had been granted asylum in the UK on the pretext that their lives were in danger from the regime in Kurdistan.
‘They were given a new life here, but then committed the very atrocities they themselves claimed to be fleeing from.’
She vowed to bring them back to the UK to face justice, too. Her chance came when she discovered Ali was in police custody in Iraq, accused of running over a boy in his car and leaving him to die.
Here, the Crown Prosecution Service was reluctant, arguing that the Iraqi constitution forbade the extradition of its citizens.
Goode persuaded the CPS to at least try. An extradition request was made and, after many months of wrangling, the authorities in Iraq and in the autonomous region of Kurdistan agreed.
Plans were made to fly Ali back by private jet, and officers were dispatched by plane to pick him up from Kurdistan.
But the Kurdistan Regional Government then changed its mind and refused to let the plane land.
They had never extradited anyone, and it was setting a legal precedent.
Nevertheless they wanted to be helpful and, in June 2009, more than three years after Banaz had perished, Ali landed back in the UK in handcuffs.
His capture, though, was only half a victory.
Omar was still free, and the prospect of getting him back looked even more remote.
He had influential friends in Kurdistan’s military and intelligence, and a powerful clan to protect him.
But towards the end of 2009, Goode learned from the British consul general in the Kurdistan capital, Erbil, that Omar was in prison after one of his brothers had shot him in the thigh in an argument over their wives.
Goode was given permission to go there and try to bring him back.
It was a daunting place for a London copper to find herself. Explosions were commonplace.
Buildings were sandbagged. Men in the street sported Kalashnikov rifles. She could travel only in convoy with a close protection team bristling with weapons.
Corruption was endemic in the area, and rumour had it that Omar’s family were threatening to kill the judge if he granted extradition.
Nor could Goode be certain that, as a woman, she would even be allowed to address the court or taken seriously.
But the evidence she provided was incontrovertible.
Omar, limping into court on crutches, claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, that he wasn’t the man she was looking for.
He also argued that he had been in Kurdistan when Banaz was murdered in London.
Goode proved him wrong.
The judge dismissed his protests and ordered his extradition to the UK. Arriving back in London and facing Goode, his reaction was a medieval one befitting the man —– he put a curse on her.
However, she still had a case to build against him, and that meant putting herself in danger by making more trips to Iraq to collect background information.
One lightbulb moment came on the last night of a trip, at a farewell dinner with her Kurdish security team.
For fun, they dressed one of Goode’s fellow officers in local costume, and as he pulled on the traditional baggy trousers, one of the local lads wound a string round his waist and tightened it, using a special hook-like knot that enabled him to do so one-handed.
This stirred a memory of the cord she had found around the dead Banaz’s neck when her body, crammed into a suitcase, was finally excavated from its secret burial place.
She remembered how Mohammed Hama had boasted about making just such a knot, and pulling it so tight as he strangled her that it had cut into her flesh.
Another piece in the jigsaw fell into place as she learned that this particular knot was one used frequently in the area to create a loop that could be tightened easily.
Back in Britain, there was a setback as the trial of the two men approached.
At the last minute, Rahmat, who had agreed to give evidence about the death threats he and Banaz had received, changed his mind.
He was too scared to go into court again.
He felt safe enough in a Witness Protection programme, but feared for his family of farmers back home near the Iran-Iraq border.
Their lives had been threatened in an attempt to shut him up.
He pleaded with Goode: ‘I have lost everything. Please don’t make me lose them, too. They are all I have left in the world.’
It took all Goode’s powers of persuasion, but she managed to get him to put his fears aside and speak out from the witness box.
Other witnesses were less helpful, if not downright obstructive.
Behya Ahmed, Banaz’s mother, had to be physically forced into court to be cross-examined.
There, she denied knowing anything and accused the police of making up lies about her.
Goode was disgusted that any mother should have to be compelled to give evidence against the men she knew full well had killed her daughter.
Even the convicted Hama, who had pleaded guilty to Banaz’s murder and was serving a life sentence for it, got in on the act.
He wrote to the judge insisting he should have his say, and in the witness box said he had been tricked into pleading guilty and it was Rahmat who had killed Banaz.
It was all lies, as must have become clear to the jury when the transcripts of Hama’s conversations, describing in detail how he killed her, were read out in court.
They returned guilty verdicts on Mohammed Ali and Omar Hussain.
As the judge sentenced them to life imprisonment, he told them: ‘In the name of so-called honour, you were willing, active participants in an agonising death.’
Goode’s success was complete three years later when fugitive Dana Amin, who had driven Banaz’s body from London to Birmingham in his car boot, made the mistake of returning to the UK.
He was arrested, tried and jailed for eight years for perverting the course of justice and preventing the lawful burial of a corpse.
Goode’s job was finally done. She had not only solved a horrific crime but brought to public attention the pernicious practice of ‘honour killings’.
For this, she was awarded the Queen’s Policing Medal. But there was no positive outcome for one person.
Rahmat never got over losing his beloved Banaz. In 2016 he killed himself, unable to bear the pain.
Adapted from Honour: Achieving Justice for Banaz Mahmod by Caroline Goode (Oneworld, £10.99). © 2020 Caroline Goode