For Muslim women, a deadly defiance
'Honor killings' on rise in Europe
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff
January 16, 2006

BERLIN -- Life was just starting to look up for 23-year-old Hatun Surucu when the bullets cut her down.

After four years of grueling courses in vocational school, coupled with the demands of single motherhood, she was only weeks away from receiving certification as an electrician, a trade that would give her the independence she desperately craved.

It had been a rough road: Eight years earlier, her parents, Turkish immigrants, had yanked Surucu from eighth grade, bundled her off to Istanbul, and forced her to marry an older cousin. Miserable in Turkey, she had fled her husband and returned to Berlin with her infant son, determined to make her own way as a modern woman in a secular society, according to friends.
For a Muslim barely out of girlhood, it was an act of extraordinary defiance against her family. And it cost Surucu her life. The rest