Afghan girl’s death sparks national debate
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3976
By Barbara Hans in Hamburg
Ahmad O. http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1449 if she goes out,” she says.
Morsal O. was 16, a young girl with joie de vivre. She laughed a lot and she was a go-getter. She was a good student, had ambition and a lot ahead of her in life. But she was murdered on Friday, May 9. Her 23-year-old brother Ahmad, with the help of a cousin, lured her to a parking lot near a subway station in the German port city of Hamburg under a false pretense and stabbed her 20 times with a knife.
If Morsal had known she would be coming face to face with her brother, she probably wouldn’t have gone that evening. The two hadn’t been on talking terms for quite some time, and Ahmed had threatened his sister repeatedly. Just before her murder, Morsal had sought refuge from her family, who moved to Germany from Afghanistan 13 years ago, at a number of city social facilities, most recently living for more than a year in a youth http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1269. But she never succeeded in breaking off contact with her family.For more than an hour, emergency doctors fought to save Morsal’s life, but she died on the way to the hospital. The girl’s parents rushed to the scene, but they weren’t allowed to attend to their daughter because they had forgotten their IDs in the midst of the turmoil.
Morsal died alone.
Killer: “My Sisters Are My Life”
“Maybe he did it out of love,” Moral’s cousin Mujda said, when asked why Ahmad stabbed his sister that night. Mudja O. gave an extensive interview to SPIEGEL TV following the crime, discussing the stabbing and her cousin’s possible motives for the killing. “We spoke to him and he told us, ‘My sisters are my life. She should be put away before anything happens to her. The last sentence that we heard from him was that he loved his sister.”
It was not the first time Ahmad, who worked in an auto parts store, had come to the attention of the police for violent acts, either. In police circles, he was known as a serial offender, constantly in trouble for beatings and even stabbings. Morsal had even tried to get charges pressed against her brother with the police after he repeatedly attacked her, but she later withdrew them.
In the SPIEGEL TV interview, her cousin says that Morsal “simply wanted more freedom.” She wanted to lead her own life and not the one her parents had planned for her. “She was actually given a lot of freedom, in my opinion. She had some piercings, for example. Her parents didn’t say anything about it. She could wear what she wanted — even if she wasn’t allowed to wear a miniskirt to school.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,554866,00.html