Honour killing: Mehmet Goren tried to murder his family before

When Mehmet Goren claimed that his daughter Tulay had run away, his wife had good reason to suspect he had killed her – because he had tried to murder his whole family in the past.

Hanim Goren could never forget the occasion when, according to Mehmet’s own relatives, he turned up at the house in Turkey late one night and presented her with a cup of poison and ordered her to drink it.

There was also the night in the early 1990s when, it is said, he tried to gas his wife and children, shutting the doors and windows and opening the tap on a canister of cooking gas as they slept.

On both occasions, which were not disclosed to the jury at the Old Bailey, he panicked after being disturbed and fled.

But when Hanim returned to her house in north London in January 1999 to find Tulay missing, her kitchen knives and bin bags also gone, she quickly realized what had happened.

For 10 years she told police and social workers that Mehmet had “swallowed” Tulay and “disappeared” her.

But without a body or a wider understanding of the concept of “honour killing” it would take a decade to bring him to court.

When she finally got to give evidence against him, Hanim broke down saying: “For 30 years I have kept a lot of things inside me … only I know, and God knows.”

Described by his own brothers as a “wolf”, Mehmet was a compulsive gambler who spent much of his life on the fringes of what they referred to as the “mafia”. He has served time in prison in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Britain.

Although he denied following an “honour code”, Mehmet tasted the kind of summary justice he would later mete out to his own daughter first-hand.

In the mid 1990s he caused uproar in Köseyahya, his village, after being found in bed with a woman who was not his wife.

Angry neighbours tied him to the back of a tractor and dragged around the streets.

It was not the first time he had upset them. According to relatives, he once set himself up as a people smuggling agent, turning up with a bag of passports collected from people he had offered to help transport abroad.

When he failed to deliver, they came looking for him.

“I remember clearly on two occasions those people raiding the village, looking for him,” said Baris Goren, Mehmet’s nephew.

“Now, it’s clear to me that anything could have happened to us, I was a kid, I didn’t realise it, but now I say to myself: ‘Goodness, we were lucky to survive’.”

Growing up in Kurdish south-eastern Turkey, Mehmet experienced the simmering distrust between the Alevi minority and the majority Sunni population which the police would later conclude lay behind Tulay’s murder.

In 1978, when he was 18, tension exploded into bloody violence, with the massacre of scores, possibly hundreds, of Alevis in the nearby city of Maras by an ultranationalist group, the Grey Wolves, in one of the murkiest episodes in modern Turkish history.

Like many other young Alevi men, Mehmet was swept into the ranks of the DHB (Devrimci Halkin Birligi), a hard-line communist group which still reveres Stalin.

He would later tell British immigration officials that he had been persecuted by the Turkish police for his political beliefs.

But, according to his own family, Mehmet’s trouble with the law had as much to do with common crime.

He is said to have first gone off the rails when he was about 12, following the death of his father. When he was 20 family elders arranged his marriage to Hanim, then just 15.

But finding work as a welder in Saudi Arabia, he soon left her to care for their two young daughters, Nuray and Tulay, making only occasional visits home throughout the early 1980s.

Around the time when their third daughter, Hatice, was born, in 1985, news came that Mehmet was in a Saudi jail, convicted of stealing a safe containing cash.

He would later claim that he had narrowly escaped being beheaded.

Back in Turkey at the end of his sentence, he abandoned the family, disappearing into a world of organized crime, leaving his brothers to settle his mounting gambling debts.

When Hanim left for Britain in the back of a lorry in 1993, Mehmet did not know she had gone. They later heard that he was in jail in Turkey for involvement in stealing an antique carpet from a mosque.

Released around 1996 he followed her to London, claiming asylum and setting up home in Glastonbury Avenue, a quiet street of mock Tudor houses in Woodford Green, east London.

He later worked at the nearby Mr Chippy fish and chip shop, supplementing the family income with benefits. But he continued to gamble, forcing Hanim to turn to his brothers for support.

Following Tulay’s disappearance in 1999, Mehmet served three years for the attack on Halil but moved back in with his wife after his licence expired.

Although suspicions about what he had done to Tulay were whispered about in the Kurdish community, it was 10 years before he finally faced justice.

“Everyone said ‘he knows the truth’, everyone believed he had done something because she was last seen with him,” said Baris Goren.

“But the truth is between him and God and he needs to come out and tell the truth.”

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