14 held for 'honour killing'

2004-04-28 10:55

Istanbul - Turkish police have arrested a man who strangled his 14-year-old daughter because she had been repeatedly raped by a stranger. Thirteen relatives who allegedly ordered him to do it were also arrested, press reports said on Wednesday.

Most newspapers ran front-page reports on the so-called "honour" killing, which provoked outrage in Turkey.

The girl, Nuran Halitoglu, had been abducted late last month while on her way to a supermarket in Avcilar, a working-class district of the country's largest city, Istanbul.

Her kidnapper, a man in his 20s, repeatedly raped her over four days before she escaped from the house where he was holding her.

The family, which comes from Van in eastern Turkey, then held a meeting and ordered the father Mehmet and his son Alaattin to kill the girl in order to lift what they saw as a stain on their honour, the reports said.

Buried in a forest

The daily Milliyet said Nuran was strangled with electric flex in a relative's house and her body buried in a forest.

After reporting his daughter's disappearance in an attempt to throw police off the scent, the father confessed to killing his daughter, the reports said. He said he would also have killed the rapist had the man not been in police custody.

Dozens of such "honour killings" are committed every year in Turkey, most of them in the deeply conservative south-east of the country.

In July last year the parliament strengthened penalties for people found guilty of such murders.

- AFP