She has been kidnapped, tortured, shot at, beaten and, at 16, forced into marriage with a stranger twice her age.

And for the past five years Sara Ali has been tracked across Britain by an army of bounty hunters… bounty hunters paid for by her own family.

Now 22, divorced and living near Newcastle with the father of her two-year-old child, Sara is a victim of so-called “honour crime”, a never-ending nightmare that began when she was just 11 years old.

This, in her own words, is the story of a young girl who eventually found the courage to stand up to her Asian family:

“We lived in a really big nine-bedroom Victorian house and it was always mad busy. My dad had two wives, so there were 11 of us.

My mum had married him in Pakistan after he claimed his wife back in the UK was dying. England was this fantasy, a picture-perfect country with money, so her father agreed to the match.

I had a good childhood, I was popular at school and was pretty much allowed to do what I wanted. But it all started to change when I was 11 years old and taken to Pakistan where men kept asking my parents if they could marry me … Mum and Dad were under a lot of cultural pressure.

I just thought it was all pretend and even when one of my sisters overheard my parents discussing my engagement I just thought this was the sort of thing that happened to big girls, not to me.

Then, when I turned 14 and was back in the UK, there was a phone call from Pakistan asking when I was going over there to be married.

All hell broke loose when I said I wouldn’t go. And it was then that the mental and physical torture began.

My father would drop to the floor, clutching his chest saying I was giving him a heart attack. My brothers and sisters told me they would kill themselves because of the shame I was bringing to the family.

I got a really bad beating from my dad. I locked myself in my bedroom but he kicked the door off its hinges and screamed at me, ‘I’m going to burn you alive.’

I remember being so scared I lay shivering from fear in my room. In the night I crept downstairs and ran to the local police station.

I was put into foster care but eventually my family got in touch and I ended going back to them because I was just so scared they would kill me if I disobeyed them.

But when I got home, things just got worse. They called me “dirt” and an “outcast”. I had to cook my own food in different pots and pans from the rest of the family.

A little while later, when I was 15, they tricked me into travelling to Pakistan by getting my grandma to phone to tell me she was really ill and wanted to see everyone before she died. I was so naive.

We all flew over, but when we arrived they drove straight past my grandma’s house. They told me I was being taken to a remote village to be married. I had no passport, no money – and no hope. I was just a child.

The wedding day was held on my 16th birthday to a man who was 40 and looked like my dad with big bushy hair, a big moustache and a pockmarked face.

I begged him to help me, saying I did not want to marry him but he told me: “Why would I say no to a walking visa?”

I knew it was hopeless, but I even told the priest during the ceremony I did not want to marry this old man, but he just carried on.

On the wedding night I had to go to my “husband’s” house where he tried to rape me. I was 16, and had never even kissed a boy before. I’d only ever held hands.

He was an animal. He held my arms and pinned me down. He started licking me and bit me like a dog. I kicked and screamed the place down which probably saved me, but still I felt like I wanted to pour bleach all over my body I felt so dirty.

In the end he pulled my trousers down and screamed in my face: “I’m not going to keep you as a wife. I’m going to use you and abuse you because you’re just a slag!”

He beat me violently and tried to rape me again but I made so much noise that his family stopped him in case someone outside the house heard. After that I kept a knife hidden under my pillow.

The next month I flew back to England with my family while he waited for his visa to join us. I went back to college for a bit, but I was messed up and started drinking. I tried to kill myself several times and even threw myself into the canal but I was always dragged back home, without any help or sympathy.

Six months after the marriage I was told my husband was coming to England to live with us and I realised I had to escape. That’s when I ran away to Wales, and over time met and fell in love with a white boy.

I thought at last that I was safe and that they would never find me. But I was wrong …

One day about 80 people turned up outside my flat – they were everywhere – blocking the road. Friends, relatives, friends of friends, neighbours of friends of friends.

When I opened the door I was slapped in the face and dragged back to a car by my hair and driven to my parents’ house.

When they got me home, my parents told me I had to sleep with my vile husband but I refused. I begged my father to kill me rather than put me through this daily hell. In total I think I ran away about half a dozen times, but they always found me – even in women’s refuges.

They paid these strangers to find me, bounty hunters, giving them my picture, my national insurance number and they showed it round, asking for me.

Eventually, I plotted with my boyfriend to run away, but it went wrong as we were spotted by a relative. We were followed by 15 cars and my brother pulled in front, forcing us to emergency stop. He got his arm through the window, flicked the lock and grabbed me by the hair, pulling me onto the road.

The police heard about it and told my family to take me to the police station. Dozens of my relatives waited outside, but the police helped me escape to a refuge.

But again they tracked me down and threatened to kill my sister if I didn’t go with them.

They forced me to go Pakistan and kept me with my so-called husband’s family in terror for nine months, telling me I was there to make babies.

I had two guards outside my door and was beaten regularly and one time I was kept in hospital with internal bleeding when his brother beat me with a chair.

They would say: “It’s not England. If we bury you now, nobody will come looking. They have no authority over here.”

I was even shot at because they said I had disrespected their brother, but it missed and went over my shoulder, I’m still deaf in one ear.

I eventually managed to slip out and phone a youth worker in the UK. It was an answer machine and I left a message: “Please get me out of here. They are going to kill me. If you don’t hear from me in the next few weeks, assume that I’m dead!”

Afterwards my husband’s family found out I had used a phone and threw me into a river, breaking my arm. But the youth worker contacted immigration who arranged for a judge to have me sent back to the UK.

I never went back to my parents and now I have a beautiful family of my own. I was in heaven until a few months ago when, out of the blue and after changing my name by deed poll I received a letter from that man, a petition for a divorce.

I was terrified, he’d simply found me by paying £14.99 to a tracker agency. But if I must, I will simply move again … people who lose hope, lose everything.’

Dying of shame

Around 5,000 women a year – 13 a day – die worldwide in “honour” crimes, according to the United Nations.

In Britain figures show 13 people die every year in honour killings, but police and support groups believe it is many more.

The Metropolitan Police are investigating 200 deaths they believe are linked to honour killings. In a BBC poll of 500 young British Asians last year, a shocking 10 per cent believed honour killings were justified. Around 250 forced marriages are reported to the Home Office Forced Marriage Unit every year, a third of which are children as young as 12 years old. The suicide rate of Asian women aged 16 to 24 is three times the national average. Sara’s name has been changed to protect her identity.