‘Murdered for wanting a life’: Banaz Mahmod ‘honour killing' comes to TV

With a track record in writing fact-based drama – including the award-winning sex trafficking drama Doing Money, which aired on the BBC in 2018 – Gwyneth Hughes is used to doing research. But her key source for Honour, an ITV two-parter that goes out next week, raised unusual issues.

“I can’t call her because I don’t have her number, and don’t know what her name is now,” Hughes explains. “So I had to wait for her to call me. I always kept a notebook by the phone in case she suddenly rang.”

The elusive interviewee was Bekhal Mahmod, who has lived in witness protection under a new identity since she helped the police with the prosecution of seven men from the London Iraqi Kurd community, who conspired to rape and murder her 20-year-old sister, Banaz Mahmod, in 2006. Banaz was the victim of a so-called “honour killing” after leaving the husband her family had arranged for her to marry, and loving a young Iranian man of her own choice. Banaz reported the risk to her life to the police on five separate occasions, but no action was taken.

Because of the protection she now requires, Bekhal’s contributions to this piece came through a web of intermediaries to prevent my knowing who or where she is now. The drama has taken six years to reach the screen, during which Bekhal has had long conversations with Hughes. “I explained to her some things about that time she might not have been aware of,” Bekhal says. “This is the truth. It’s amazing how she has done it. I actually didn’t think that she would relay word for word how I explained things to her, but she has.”

Understandably, Bekhal viewed an advance copy of Honour with some apprehension – “I was very, very emotional. It brought it all back. I was very choked up and tearful, and I didn’t sleep much after watching” – but feels happy to have cooperated with the project. “It shows how the police found the Iraqi Kurdish community; it’s such a tight-knit community, so hush-hush and secretive. I hope that by shining a light on this issue, it might prevent what happened to Banaz from happening again.”

A theme of Honour is the emotional impact on all those who worked on the case. The legal consultant was Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor, who had overall charge of the prosecution of those who plotted against and killed Banaz. He prosecuted more than 1,000 murders in his career, but recalls this case as uniquely gruelling. “We were working against the victim’s family, whereas normally you’d expect to be working with them,” he says. “They didn’t even want to bury her.” Afzal, the police and a charity bought a gravestone for Banaz and held a memorial service. “It’s the only time I’ve ever done that as a prosecutor.”

The two-part drama is a legal procedural. That may be a common TV genre, but its use is justified here, Afzal believes, because of the unprecedented complexity of the prosecution. Two of the suspects had fled to Iraq and became the first successful extraditions from the country to Britain.

“We were determined,” says Afzal, “that every single person who was involved in that murder was brought to justice, as a statement of intent that no one should ever be allowed to kill a 20-year-old girl for kissing her boyfriend outside a tube station.”

Honour has attracted some controversy for telling the story from the perspective of DCI Caroline Goode, the Metropolitan police’s chief investigating officer, played by Keeley Hawes. For some, the point of view and casting perpetrate a “white saviour” trope.

Afzal is dismissive of this criticism. “The idea that it’s a ‘white saviour’ story is ludicrous. I cannot belittle the work of Caroline Goode and her team. They were fighting internally in the Met police to get this case taken seriously. You’re not normally fighting to persuade the police to investigate a homicide. So you cannot exaggerate the efforts of Caroline and her team. The story is told from the point of view of someone who was a pivotal figure in ensuring justice was done.”

Bekhal says she is “glad that it was produced from the police’s point of view. That side of this story has never been told and that is exactly what happened. It highlights how much the police team had to push in order to bring everyone to justice.”

“The important thing is that Caroline Goode didn’t save anyone,” adds Hughes. “The girl died. She brought the murderers to justice. But she did that in partnership with some amazing Kurds, principally Banaz’s sister. I’ve tried to write it from their dual point of view.”

Some commenters imply that the protagonist here ought to be Banaz. But, Hughes says: “If I’d told it from Banaz’s viewpoint, it can only end in a horrible sordid murder. I didn’t want to do that. Also, ITV is a commercial network – they want people to watch. Bekhal lost her sister, she wants people to watch. The point about Keeley Hawes, apart from being a great actress, is that she is a star who brings an audience. You want as many to watch as possible. Our aim in the drama is to say: this must never happen again, Banaz didn’t die in vain.”

Viewers will want to hope that Banaz’s death represented an extreme outlier of British society, which improvements to police and prosecution methods should now prevent. But is it still happening? Hannana Siddiqui, of Southall Black Sisters, which works with victims of violence against women in south Asian and African communities, says: “Our helpline gets about 7,500 calls a year. That’s a mixture of domestic violence and honour-based violence. And this year, during lockdown, there was a huge increase in helpline calls. There’s also research that suggests 12 honour killings [take place] a year. But it’s hard to say the figures because it is a hidden crime.”

Banaz’s case – and its dramatisation – also lead to conflicting instincts for some white liberals, whose feminist principles encourage support for coerced women, but whose desire to be anti-racist leads to fears of racially profiling and stereotyping Muslim men. Afzal faced this dilemma directly, having, in another part of his career as a crown prosecutor, overturned the original decision not to prosecute a group of largely Pakistani-heritage men who were grooming and sexually abusing young women in Rochdale.

“The law has to operate without fear or favour across the board,” Afzal says. “When you have [something which is] not a new crime, but one being prosecuted for the first time, you can’t afford to think about which communities might be disproportionately implicated. Eighty-four per cent of sex offenders in this country are British white men. Are we saying all white men are like that? Of course not. You have to take the same attitude to forced marriage and honour-based violence in the south Asian, African and Middle Eastern communities.”

“In the Banaz case,” adds Siddiqui, “one of the reasons police were reluctant to get involved was the fear of being accused of cultural insensitivity by the community. And, I think, increasingly, there are now religious sensitivities as well. So there is a fear of interfering in minority cultures or faiths. But you have to be able to intervene. That is mature multiculturalism.”

Hughes admits to concern about the issue. “With this material, you obviously worry about contributing to further social divisions in our country. But you can’t have a situation in which young women are dying and their voices are silenced because of some white liberal fear. For me, feminism outweighed that fear.”

She also points out that there are “male heroes” in the film, especially Banaz’s boyfriend, Rahmat (who, in another of the story’s horrors, later took his own life), and a Kurdish interpreter, Nawzad Gelly, who translated crucial communications.

“I was very concerned not to paint all Kurdish men as murderous bastards because clearly they’re not,” Hughes says. “The police told me about this marvellous Kurdish interpreter, but he’d disappeared from Home Office lists. It took me six months to track him down. He’d gone home to Kurdistan. So we spoke and everything he said to me is in the film. He explained to me that – apart from the misogyny that is obviously a big part of honour killings – it also has to be understood as economics: if nobody marries your daughters because of their so-called ‘shame’ then you’re stuffed within the terms of the community. Neither he nor I are endorsing that system, but it helped me to write about it in terms other than: you are evil.”

From her brave new life, Bekhal hopes Honour will reduce the risk of similar violence occurring. “I sometimes see a woman walking with her husband and, the way they are, I know something isn’t right. The women are so sheltered and dismissed by the male community. They aren’t allowed to mix the way a normal human being should be able to mix, and have a life. For wanting a life, you end up getting murdered. That’s not right, there has to be an end to that. The only way to end that is to make people more aware of it and to watch out for signs.”

She also hopes the drama will be a memorial to who her sister was. “Banaz was lovely. She was honestly the calmest person in any situation. It didn’t matter what it was. She never had any bad feelings towards anybody, even if you’d wronged her. She was very forgiving and very affectionate to people. She was more forgiving than people deserved, she was calm and collected. She was a lovely person. I’d like to think of her as a living person with her kids running around her, but obviously that’s not possible. So I’d like her to be remembered for the good things.”

Honour is on ITV at 9pm, 28 and 29 September