BERLIN — Frost covers the roses, and the scrawled eulogies are tattered near the sidewalk where Hatun Surucu was gunned down. The attackers appeared on a cold night more than a month ago. Three shots were fired and the young Turkish woman crumpled in the blurred glare of a streetlight.
The accused assailants fled to a place that Surucu knew well: the home where she was raised. Her killers, police say, were her brothers.
A 23-year-old single mother seeking to escape tradition and religious constraints, Surucu was the sixth Muslim woman to have died in the German capital since October in suspected "honor killings," slayings arranged by families who believe that their reputations have been stained.
Such crimes are rarely mentioned in Germany's newspapers.
But Surucu's public slaying has instigated fresh debates on politics, immigration, human rights and a rigorous Islam adopted by a minority of Muslims confronted with poverty, discrimination and liberal European attitudes. The case is a portrait of contradictions -- much like Surucu, whose memorial pictures show her either wearing the hijab, the head scarf of her Eastern heritage, or with the uncovered hair of her Western aspirations.
"Hatun couldn't bring her two worlds together," said Marko Katovcic, a classmate in an electrical apprentice program. "There is too much contradiction between these worlds. We knew she had problems, but she didn't talk about private things."
Surucu's violent fate is a verse in the larger epic of European immigration. The continent's Muslim population has nearly doubled to about 14 million over the last decade. Many Muslim immigrants seek immediate assimilation. Others practice their religion and traditions while embracing their adopted countries. A small but growing proportion turns to more radical religious precepts that have unsettled the continent since Sept. 11, 2001, and last year's Madrid train bombings.
Surucu crossed all strands of these immigrant classes, but it was only after her death that her predicament touched German society.
On websites and television shows and in speeches and proclamations, Surucu, who lived with her 5-year-old son in a worn-down complex of pre-World War II apartment buildings, has become a symbol for causes ranging from women's rights to conservative Christianity.
"Something like this happens, and suddenly all Turks in Germany get recognized through Hatun," said Eren Unsal, a representative of the Turkish Assn. in Berlin and Brandenburg. "This is not fair or accurate."
