Kurd jailed for life in for ‘honour killing‘

A 50-year-old Turkish Kurd was jailed for life in Germany on Tuesday over the brutal "honour killing" of his 20-year-old daughter.

BERLIN, December 29, 2009 (AFP) - A 50-year-old Turkish Kurd was jailed for life in Germany on Tuesday over the brutal "honour killing" of his 20-year-old daughter, a murder carried out by the victim's twin brother and an accomplice.

Gulsum Semin was lured to a patch of wasteland on March 2 where her brother, named in media reports as Davut Semin, and his Russian accomplice strangled her with a clothes line until she lost consciousness, police said in April.

The pair then beat her in the face with sticks so badly that she died from her injuries, leaving her looking "as if she had been run over by a train," the Bild daily cited a medical expert as telling the court.

They then took her purse to look it look like a violent robbery and covered the body with leaves.

"Her skull was destroyed so much it was unrecognizable. The skull was broken, her eye sockets were broken," Bild quoted the judge as saying.

"Gulsum S. was the victim of a dreadful crime. Gulsum was a young, beautiful and positive woman. She was murdered for treacherous and base reasons," the judge said.

The woman had been in conflict for some time with her family because she had chosen to adopt a "Western" lifestyle that was incompatible with the traditional Muslim way of life as seen by her father, police said.

She moved in with an Albanian man but then moved back to her family in late 2008, when she refused an arranged marriage with a relative. The same day as the murder, the brother had discovered that her sister had had an abortion.

The father, named in media reports as Yusuf Semin, was found by the court to have been the main instigator and convicted of murder. Arrested on April 1, the brother confessed but the father denied any involvement.

The brother was sentenced to nine and a half years behind bars, while the 32-year-old Russian accomplice was given seven and a half years by the court in Kleve, western Germany, a spokeswoman said.

Newspapers named the accomplice as asylum seeker Miro M.

Germany has been shocked by around 50 so-called "honour killings" since 1996, mainly in the country's three-million strong Turkish minority.