TIMESONLINE….A tearful mother today described finding her teenage daughter tied up on a bedroom floor the day before the schoolgirl was allegedly murdered by her father in an “honour killing”.
Hanim Goren told the Old Bailey that her daughter Tulay’s hands and feet were bound so tightly that they had turned purple.
She said that her husband, Mehmet, told her that he had tied the 15-year-old girl up to stop her from running away.
Tulay had agreed to return to her home in Woodford Green, northeast London, in January 1999 after disgracing her family by living with a boyfriend twice her age, the jury was told.
Mrs Goren, 45, has broken a 10-year silence to give evidence against her husband and his brothers Ali, 55, and Cuma, 42, who are accused of her daughter’s murder, the court has heard.
She said that she had returned home with another daughter, Hatice, 13, to find her husband and Cuma Goren sitting downstairs without Tulay on January 6, 1999.
“When we couldn’t see her downstairs, Hatice and I ran up the stairs straight away,” she told the court, speaking through a Turkish interpreter.
“In the children’s bedroom I saw Tulay lying on the floor face down. Her hands and her feet were tied up. Her hands and her feet were all a purple, black colour, tied,” she told the court. “Tulay said, ‘Mum, don’t untie, I want to die’.”
Mrs Goren said that she was crying as she tried to untie her daughter but that her husband ran upstairs and ordered her to stop.
“Mehmet said, ‘So that she doesn’t run away again, I tied her up’,” she told the court.
“Then after that I don’t know who untied her, whether it was Hatice, whether it was me or whether it was Mehmet himself, I don’t remember.”
That evening Mrs Goren invited a number of relatives to the house to discuss Tulay’s future, the court was told. Later she saw her daughter with her legs dangling from the window of an upstairs bathroom.
Mrs Goren said that she spent the night with her husband and daughter in the living room.
“I brought a cushion and a blanket and I put the cushion on the floor and made her lie down. She slept there,” said Mrs Goren.
“Mehmet slept on the sofa. He pulled the armchair in front of the door so that the door wouldn’t open.
“I put my head on Tulay’s feet and legs and I just lay down on the carpet and slept like that.”
Mrs Goren said that the following day her husband ordered her to leave the house with her two youngest children. As she left the house she had a final conversation with Tulay.
“I was very angry and very cross with her,” Mrs Goren told the court.
Jurors have been told that Tulay went missing in January 1999 and her body has never been found.
Mehmet Goren and his brothers Ali and Cuma, both of Walthamstow, East London, deny murdering Tulay on January 7, 1999. They also deny conspiracy to murdering her boyfriend Hilal Unal between May 1998 and February 1999.
The trial continues.