Bangladeshi gets life term for honour killing

London: A Bangladesh-origin man and his two sons were found guilty of killing a university student.

A jury at Oxford Crown Court ruled that 44-year-old Chomir Ali, working as a waiter at an Indian restaurant, ordered his two sons Mohammed Mujibar Rahman, 19 and Mamnoor Rahman, 16, to kill Arash Ghorbani-Zarin, a 19-year-old Iranian student, on November 20 2003.

The body of Ghorbani-Zarin, student of Oxford Brookes University, was found in his car in Spencer Crescent, Rosehill, an Oxford suburb.

He had been stabbed 46 times, mostly in the chest, the police said.

The three will be jailed for life. Justice Gross adjourned setting a minimum term for their sentences to a date to be fixed.

The three will either be sentenced at Oxford Crown Court or the High Court.

There were loud cheers from the dock, which broke the tension when the jury read out their verdicts.

According to the prosecution, Chomir Ali who bullied his two young British-born sons into killing Ghorbani-Zarin, boasted that the murder was to 'vindicate the family's honour' after the engineering student made Ali's daughter pregnant.

All three defendants continued to look straight ahead without emotion as the verdicts were read out.

The judge also lifted a ban on naming 16-year-old Mamnoor, Ali's younger son, who has remained anonymous throughout the trial.

With so-called honour killings on the increase in Britain, detectives described this as one of the most tragic cases they had encountered.

Gentle-natured and a Muslim himself, Ghorbani-Zarin had said that it was not his intention to insult her family but felt that he had nothing to hide or apologise for.

Manna Begum, 19, defied her father's demand that she marry a man she had never met in Bangladesh and tried to kill herself after her family held her prisoner at home.

Earlier her father even tried to stop paramedics getting into the house to take his daughter to hospital after she slashed her wrists.

Days later, in October last year, she ran away after secretly getting engaged, but was forced to return to the family home.

Her boyfriend had taken a part-time job to support them and was on his way to collect Manna in his car when he was ambushed by her two brothers.