They say you always hurt the ones you love, but this is taking it too far:

A Turkish teenager found dead in a hole next to her house was probably buried alive, a post-mortem examination has revealed.

Medine Memi, 16, was found in the hole in December. Large amounts of soil were in her lungs and stomach, according to a source who has seen the report.

Her father and grandfather have been arrested, but not charged.

[...] Her hands had been tied behind her back, and they discovered large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach.

The autopsy has concluded that she was almost certainly buried alive.

The police went to her home after a neighbour reported that Medine had not been seen for a month.

They found her body in a hole, newly covered with concrete, next to the hen-house.

I was going to make this another in the Too Much Faith series of posts I’ve been doing, but the article claims religion didn’t really have anything to do with it:

Medine, who had never been to school, lived in Kahta, a town in the mainly Kurdish south-east of Turkey, where most honour killings have taken place.

The town is known for being very conservative and religious; it is a stronghold of the once powerful Naksibendi Islamic sect, which was banned by modern Turkey’s founding father Ataturk in 1925 but has revived in recent years.

But while it is true that most such killings are carried out in conservative Muslim communities, the practice is linked more to the customs of this region of Turkey, than to religious belief.

When girls or women are deemed to have stained the family honour, by behaviour as innocent as simply talking to boys, there is strong peer pressure from the community on the male members of the family to restore their honour, say groups working on the issue in the south-east.

The only way allowed by their code is to kill the girl or woman – usually a young man is given the task after a family council meeting, and the method and location of the killing are discussed in detail.

It still stinks of delusion to me. Seriously, how fucked up do you have to be to bind one of your own kids, put them in a hole, and shovel dirt in on them until they choke to death on it? I can’t imagine the horror of being the victim of such an act let alone it being compounded by the fact that the perpetrators were people who supposedly loved me. And what horrible thing had this poor girl done to deserve such a fate? She had talked to some boys.

According to the news article, there have been 16 honor killings in the province of Adiyaman, where Medine lived, between 2003 and 2007. It’s the sort of thing you’d think the world would have outgrown by now, but it’s not confined to just Turkey.

Here’s something to think about: According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) there are some 5,000 honor killings yearly around the world with some countries having laws that make it perfectly legal.