The mother's heartbreaking (and horrifying) testimony from the trial of dad MEHMET GOREN, who is accused of murdering his 15-year-old daughter in an "honor killing."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/honour-killing-tuley-goren-mehmet
I found my daughter tied up, mother tells 'honour killing' jury
Tuley Goren was lying on floor, says wife of accused
Three deny murdering 15-year-old a decade ago
Karen McVeigh guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 20 October 2009 20.13 BST
The mother of an alleged 15-year-old "honour killing" victim told a court how the day before she died, she found her daughter lying tied up, face-down on the floor, with her hands and feet black and bruised from being bound.
Mehmet Goren, 49, denies murdering Tuley Goren in January 1999. Her body has never been found.
His wife, Hanim Goren, who is giving evidence against him through a translator, broke down in the witness box as she spoke of the days before Tuley's killing and the moment when she "looked at me in the eye for the last time".
She told the court her husband said he had tied her up after she ran off with her boyfriend Halil Unal, to stop her doing it again. The court heard that the family were against the relationship because Unal was a Sunni Muslim, while they were Alevis and at 30, he was 15 years older than Tuley. Her daughter had gone to stay with Unal, but on 6 January 1999 she and her husband brought her home, she said.
Later that day Hanim Goren returned from picking up two of her younger children, Tuncay, 8, and Hatice, 13, from school to find her husband and his brother, Cuma, sitting downstairs without Tuley, she told the court. She went upstairs to find the schoolgirl in her bedroom.
She said: "I saw Tuley lying on the floor face down, her hands and feet were tied up. Her hands and her feet were all purple and black. Hatice cried and screamed and jumped on her and the two of us tried to untie her. Tuley said: 'Mum don't untie me I want to die.'
"In the meantime, Mehmet had come from downstairs: 'Don't untie, don't touch, don't untie her,' he said. Hatice and I were crying."
After Mehmet Goren explained that she had been tied because she had run off, she was untied. But later that night, after Tuley tried to escape through a bathroom window, her father slapped her, saying to her: "My daughter, what are you trying to do?" He then drugged her, crushing up a sleeping pill and putting it into her coffee, Goren told the jury. She said that Tuley was suspicious but drank the coffee after her father took a sip with the words: "So what? If someone is going to die, let me die." The next day, Mehmet Goren told his wife not to send the children to school.
In an emotional testimony during which she began weeping, she told the court: "She [Tuley] looked at me in the eye for the last time. She said: 'Mum I don't want to eat.' I said: 'Please take a little bit.' She had not eaten the night before."
She told the court her husband had told her to take the other children to Cuma's house. As they left, he told his son, Tuncay: "Come let Tulay kiss you … this will be the last time you will see each other."
Goren stayed the night at Cuma Goren's house, while Mehmet Goren stayed elsewhere. At one point, he called her to tell her that Tuley had run away again.
She said: "Mehmet told me she ran away. I didn't believe it. I was thinking about this. I had a feeling I wondered maybe he had tied her up in the house to punish her again. I couldn't stay still."
She told the court how, after that day, she noticed scratches and a "deep wound" to her husband's hand. When she asked him about it, he told her he had slipped on a banana skin. She said that he had washed his clothes after Tuley disappeared. There were two kitchen knives, much of a roll of black dustbin bags and a washing line missing from their home.
Cuma Goren, 42, from Walthamstow, London, and Mehmet's other brother, Ali, 55, from Walthamstow, also deny murdering Tuley on 7 January 1999. Mehmet Goren and his two brothers also deny conspiring to murder Unal between May 1998 and February 1999. The trial continues.