Once Again

She got to it before I could, and left not a single approriate word unsaid.

Ten years ago her Kurdish family immigrated to London from Iraq, to escape Saddam, they said. The father married teenaged Banaz to a man who harmed her.

She ran, kept running.

Four times, she pled for protection from London Police. Four times, they dismissed her.

Killers raped her first, then strangled her, buried her in a garden belonging to colluders.

At trial, a female police officer, who’d earlier dismissed Banaz’s four different pleadings for protection, as “dramatic and calculating” thus giving the girl no refuge, no investigation… admitted at the murder trial in Old Bailey court, that she’d made “a dreadful mistake.”