Nurdan Eker
born 1978
stabbed: 30 September 2009
Residence: Wiesbaden
Origin: Turkey
Children: 2 daughters (aged 11 and 13 at the time of the crime)
Perpetrator: her husband Hazan E. (38 years old)
At the age of 16, Nurdan was married in Turkey. Her father is violent and removes her from school in the 5th grade. Nurdan has two daughters. Five years after marriage, her husband dies.
Her mother marries a new man. He has another son in Germany, divorced from a German woman. The truck driver Hazan would now have a Turkish wife. Nurdan is married to him. She moves to Wiesbaden.
Because her husband severely abuses her and their daughters, Nurdan flees to a shelter for women run by the Association for the Welfare of Workers. In 2008, the marriage dissolved. After 252 days in the women's shelter, she moves into her own apartment with her daughters.
There, on September 30, 2009, the two girls find their mother raped and murdered with 58 stab wounds. The 38-year-old ex-husband turns himself in to the police, but has an alibi. It later turns out that the time of the crime was much earlier than assumed. The husband is arrested.
The two daughters fly to Turkey for their mother's funeral and cannot travel out. They are now with their grandparents and are thus in danger of being forcibly married off as well. The labor movement in Germany engages a lawyer and raises money for the girls' education.
In mid-2010 the trial begins at the district court in Wiesbaden. Hazan follows the trial mostly grinning and laughing. The daughters testify that the stepfather was also violent towards them. In March 2011, Hazan is sentenced to life imprisonment for rape and murder, without any particularly serious culpability. The judge spoke of a motive for the crime at the lowest level. The defense had demanded an acquittal.
Two years later, the Association for the Welfare of Workers renamed the women's shelter as Nurdan Eker House. The report mentioned that Nurdan had rebelled against the "anti-life laws of a chauvinistic Islam." The two daughters live with their grandmother in Turkey. In Wiesbaden, they continue to raise money for their education. Later, the young women study architecture at an art school. It remains problematic that Turkish offenders are often deported only after part of their sentence. And regardless of the threat - in this case to the stepdaughters.
