Turkish Girl Buried Alive For Friendship With Boy

Honor killings are all too common in the Muslim world. But the case of Turkish 16-year-old Medine Memi is truly beyond comprehension.

A coroner said that Medine has been discovered bound and lifeless in sitting position in a 2m hole dug beneath a chicken coop outside the family’s house in the town of Kahta in Southeastern Turkey, 40 days after she had disappeared. The hole had been cemented over.

The girl had been buried alive, medical examiners concluded. According to the Times, she had repeatedly gone to the police to report beatings at the hands of her father and grandfather in the days leading up to her killing.

Why did her family turn on her?

“She has male friends,” her father explained. “We are uneasy about that.”

Reuters has a picture of the hole where Memi’s life was ended. The father and the grandfather will now stand trial for the murder. Sentencing in honor killings in Turkey is notoriously slight, perhaps 5 or 7 years behind bars, if a sentence is meted out at all. What kind of society finds more dishonor in friendship between members of the opposite sex than it does in filicide?

I came across the following news documentary on honor killings in Turkey that was filmed in a Kurdish region of the country, and which might help contextualize Memi’s story: