Honour-killing victim told police four times of fears father would murder her

Banaz Mahmod made no secret of her belief that her father wanted to kill her. She was in hospital, nursing wounds incurred in an escape from him, when her boyfriend recorded a video of her on his mobile phone, in December 2005.

"It was just me and him in the living room. I turned around every now and then because I didn't trust him," she told the camera. Ms Mahmod also told police, four times, that she feared for her life and produced a list of three men she believed would murder her - but all to no avail.

Less than a month after making the video she was strangled. Her body was packed into a suitcase and driven 100 miles from London to Birmingham where she was buried in a back garden with the ligature - a shoelace - still around her neck.

Yesterday, campaigners demanded an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation into why Ms Mahmod, 20, died, at the end of a three-month Old Bailey trial in which her father, Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, from Mitcham, south London, were convicted of murdering her. Mohamad Hama, 30, of West Norwood, south London, an associate of Ari Mahmod, had already pleaded guilty to the murder.

It emerged during the trial that a female police officer concluded Ms Mahmod had made up her story to get her boyfriend's attention. PC Angela Cornes, one of several officers who could be investigated by Scotland Yard's Directorate of Professional Standards, also told the jury that she had been instructed to doctor evidence by a detective inspector, Caroline Goode, to present the investigation in a better light.

The campaign of intimidation against Ms Mahmod began when she met the man who was to become her boyfriend, Rahmat Sulemani, after fleeing an abusive, two-year arranged marriage, which had been punctuated by beatings and sexual violence. She had to keep her relationship quiet because Mr Sulemani did not come from the same Mirawdaly group of villages in Iraqi Kurdistan where her family originated.

When word of the affair started getting back to Mahmod's "controlling, powerful" brother Ari that the couple had been seen out together, a family "council of war" was held. But the decision about what to do had apparently already been taken. A day before, Ari telephoned Amir Abbas Ibrahim, an associate in Birmingham, to arrange for the burial of Banaz's body. Mr Ibrahim has now fled Britain.

Mahmod tried to kill his daughter first on New Year's Eve 2005, when he lured her to her grandmother's house and forced her to drink brandy, but she ran away.

Afterwards she collapsed and was taken to hospital. She refused to leave the ambulance at first, insisting her father was trying to kill her and, once in hospital, recorded the message. When asked to investigate, PC Cornes was more concerned with a window broken as Ms Mahmod escaped from the house, and wanted to charge her with criminal damage.

Ms Mahmod soon returned to her family and pretended she was no longer seeing Mr Sulemani, but they were spotted together in Brixton, south London. Within hours, a group of men approached Mr Sulemani and tried to lure him into a car, but he refused, and told his girlfriend about it. A woman police officer tried to persuade her to stay in a safe house but Ms Mahmod thought she would be safe at home because her mother was there. The next day, when her parents went out, the men were able to come to the family home and murder her.

During the trial, DI Goode said other officers blamed the PC Cornes for the death. The campaign group the Southall Black Sisters has demanded an investigation by the IPCC. The Commission said it had been monitoring the case but had not, as yet, been asked to investigate.

Mr Sulemani, 29, who has had to move home and live under an assumed name, said last night that he had had to harass police officers to make them believe Ms Mahmod had gone missing. One Metropolitan Police officer said last night the initial handling of the case had set back by 25 years the Met's efforts to encourage victims of crime to come forward.