Murder of Fadime Şahindal

Fadime Şahindal (2 April 1975, in Elbistan – 21 January 2002, in Uppsala) was a Kurdish immigrant who moved to Sweden from Turkey at the age of seven.

Fadime Şahindal was born in 1975 in the southeastern, Kurdish part of Turkey, in a small village outside the city of Elbistan.

She described her family as happy people who worked together with agriculture and animal husbandry, where everyone knew their role and task.

[4] She was opposed to her family's insistence on arranging her marriage to a male cousin who lived in their Kurdish native village in Turkey.

Şahindal was scheduled to move in with her boyfriend, Patrick, the following month, in June 1998, when he died in a car accident.

Nalin Pekgul, a Kurdish-Swedish parliamentarian, negotiated a compromise in which Şahindal agreed to stay away from Uppsala and her father promised not to stalk her.

Later, when Fadime Şahindal was about to leave the apartment to go to her friend's house and sleep over, she opened the door and met her father.

During the trial, her father said that another man killed Şahindal, but claimed that he could not reveal the killer's identity under threat of death.

[1][9] Her murder also sparked debates in Sweden about immigrant integration and raised questions regarding Patrick's death.