A family gathers in the courtroom. Two brothers sit on the left, her brother-in-law on the right. The three are here in different roles, the brothers are accused, the brother-in-law appears as a joint plaintiff. But they are all here because one of their family members has passed away. Maryam H., defendant’s sister and co-plaintiff’s ex-wife. Her brothers are said to have killed her in July last year and driven her body through half of Germany in a suitcase to bury her in a forest. The murder trial began on Wednesday before the Berlin district court.
When the fact became known in the summer, it quickly became a nationwide topic. The family fled Afghanistan in 2015. And she has an archaic idea of how a woman should behave, that she has to submit first to her brothers and later to her husband. But Maryam H. wanted to accept that less and less. In Germany, she separated from her husband and entered into a new relationship, “contrary to her brothers’ moral standards,” as the public prosecutor puts it. The two allegedly lured her sister out of the house, choked her and cut her throat. Maryam H. was 34 years old.
The murder of Maryam H. was also a political issue in the Berlin election campaign. The then social senator for the left spoke of “femicide”, meaning that Maryam H. only had to die because she was a woman. Franziska Giffey (SPD), who ran for the post of governing mayor, said it had to be clearly stated that this was a “cruel honor killing”. A discussion about the integration of refugees began, and comparisons were drawn with the Hatun Sürücü case. In 2005, the Kurdish German woman was shot dead by one of her brothers in Berlin because she wanted to live in the West and love a German man.
The crime was an election campaign issue
On the first day of the trial, one thing becomes clear in court: how little is known about the H. family and how many questions are still unanswered. The two accused, 23 and 27 years old, do little to solve the case, they sit motionless behind their defense attorneys. When the presiding judge asks them if they want to comment, they shake their heads. They only give their personal details. Yousuf H., the elder, has completed an apprenticeship and worked as a security guard, his younger brother Mahdi H. says he lives on state aid. “I have no job, no wife and no children.” The two deny having anything to do with the crime. One of her defense lawyers says that politicians exploited the crime “on the backs of refugees” and that the accused “were never able to claim the benefit of the presumption of innocence”.
What is certain is that Maryam H. was forced to marry her much older husband in Afghanistan when she was 16, and the couple had two children. In 2015, after a difficult flight, the family reached Germany, part of the family was accommodated in Berlin, a brother in Donauwörth. Maryam H. had a hard time. Her husband is said to have been violent and stalked her after she divorced him. Family members are said to have threatened her and her father to have rejected her. Her brothers struggled in their new lives, both became delinquents, both were diagnosed with mental illnesses.
The court must now find out who killed Maryam H. There is a lot of evidence against the two brothers: pictures from a surveillance camera, for example, showing the men heaving a suitcase onto the train and driving to Donauwörth, where Yousuf H. lived; the testimony of a witness who took Yousuf H. to a hardware store where he bought a shovel and then to the wooded area where Maryam H. was buried; Younger brother’s DNA traces on a disposable glove found on his sister’s body.
And the court must also find out what role the family played in the crime. Whether other family members knew about the crime. Maryam H.’s former husband is also sitting in the courtroom with his head bowed. He has an odd dual role in this process. He is the man with whom Maryam H. did not want to live, but also the legal representative of their children, who appear here as joint plaintiffs. They are ten and 14 years old and now live in a home. When asked how they are doing, the lawyer for the co-plaintiff says: According to the circumstances, he lists the circumstances. War in the country of origin, trauma caused by the flight, life in shelters. And then they lost their mother too.