Thaindian News

London, Nov 11 (IANS) Two Iraqi men, who fled to their home country after killing their cousin in 2006 for falling in love with a man disapproved of by her family, were sentenced to life imprisonment by a British court after their extradition.

Mohammed Ali and Omar Hussain were found guilty of murdering Banaz Mahmod, 20, in January 2006 after she fell in love with a man disapproved of by her family.

According to the Daily Mail, Banaz was subjected to an horrific assault, strangled, and stuffed in a suitcase found buried under a Birmingham patio three months later.

In a letter handed to police weeks before she died, Banaz had named Hussain and Ali as men “ready and willing to do the job of killing me”.

Judge Brian Barker, the Common Serjeant of London, told the convicts: “This was a barbaric and callous crime.

The men carried out the murder with the help of a third man, Mohammad Hama, on behalf of Banaz’s father, Mahmod Mahmod, and uncle, Ari Mahmod.

Hama and the Mahmod brothers, members of the Kurdish community, were jailed at the Old Bailey in 2007.

Ali, 30, and Hussain, 32, escaped justice, having fled to their homeland in northern Iraq, a country with a ban on extraditing its citizens.

Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Goode, who pursued their extradition said the case was a warning to those who tried to escape justice: “We are not going to give up.”

“The extradition is legal history,” she was quoted as saying.