Morsal Obeidi

Morsal Obeidi ( 7 September 1991 – 15 May 2008) was a German-Afghan girl who was murdered in an honour killing in Hamburg. Her brother Ahmad Sobair Obeidi killed her, making it an act of sororicide, and he was jailed for life for the act.

Background Obeidi was born on 7 September 1991 in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. Her father, Ghulam-Mohammed Obeidi, a member of the Afghan Communist Party, piloted military aircraft. He left the country as pro-Soviets lost control of Afghanistan at the end of the Soviet–Afghan War, and in 1992 arrived in Hamburg, which already had a sizeable expatriate Afghan population. Morsal, then three, and her brother, then ten, came to Germany two years later. She, her brother, and her other family members became German citizens. Her father, who became a bus driver, had difficulty obtaining high quality employment and assimilating into German society, and he criticized Morsal for assimilating too much and Ahmad for committing crimes.

Ahmad was convicted of a crime and sentenced to a prison term of one year and five months in October 2007; he had no parole eligibility. The court ordered him to report to prison on 2 May 2008 but he did not begin his sentence at that time. On 9 May, his lawyer made a request to start the sentence at a later time, but on 15 May the court upheld the start of his sentencing. Der Spiegel wrote that Ahmad "resented" how his sister desired to assimilate into German society while he was a "failure in life" in what was "a foreign place".

In an interview on Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) Ahmad's mother publicly expressed dislike for her son and his father labeled him as a criminal. German-Turkish lawyer and feminist Seyran Ateş stated that because their families find the idea of their own daughters to be expressing sexuality to be an attack on their reputations, "These are not 'so-called' honor killings, but plain and simple honor killings."