Germany: A Berlin court has jailed for nine years a young man from a Turkish-Kurdish immigrant family who shot dead his sister in a so-called "honour killing" that shocked the country.
Ayhan Sürücü (20) admitted killing his sister Hatun last year because he disapproved of her western lifestyle as a working single mother with regular German boyfriends.
His two older brothers were accused of involvement in the killing but were acquitted due to lack of evidence.
"It is only natural that every young woman, regardless of nationality, may live here as she pleases," said Judge Michael Degrief. He said Ayhan Sürücü's motive to kill his sister was a "mixture of handed-down tradition and ideas of family honour firmly anchored in eastern Anatolian families". But these traditions had no standing before German law, he said, remarking that the Sürücü family "lived in Kreuzberg but clearly not in Germany".
Hatun was born and raised in Berlin with German citizenship until she was sent to marry a cousin in Istanbul in 1998 aged 15. She soon left her husband, returned pregnant to Berlin the following year. She gave birth to a son in 1999 and divorced her husband.
She moved out of her parents' apartment in the Turkish neighbourhood of Kreuzberg and began studying to become an electrical engineer.
When she stopped wearing a head scarf, started wearing makeup and began dating a German man, her brothers threatened her by phone - calling her a "whore" and telling her never to come home. Ayhan met Hatun on February 7th last year under the pretence of a family reunion and shot her three times in the head at a bus stop, leaving her lying in the snow.
After the killing, Ayhan told his girlfriend that he had "finally done what [ his] brothers should have done long ago". She turned state's evidence, testifying that Ayhan's two older brothers were also involved.
But the court dismissed her evidence as hearsay and acquitted the two brothers, a verdict now under appeal. There have been around 56 such "honour killings" in Germany in the last decade, with six alone in the last six months in Berlin.