“I locked all the doors. And I was afraid he’d come and do something to us,” said the 17-year-old son who was ordered to kill his sister, while speaking to police.

Bild newspaper reports that the 17-year-old son courageously defied his father after he ordered the boy to kill his sister because she had violated the family’s honor.

Her alleged violation?

She had saved a boy’s phone number on her phone, which was supposed to merit a death sentence.

“He looked at me with a cold stare. No smile, nothing,” the brother said. “Then he said, ‘You have to kill her. Make it look like an accident, like a fight. No one must know that she insulted my honor.’”

The teenager went to the police with the information, saying it was clear he would never take his sister’s life.

“It deserves the highest recognition that a young person in such a difficult and stressful situation finds the courage to turn to the police and thus also to stand up against his own father,” says Stephan Hartmann, head of the 1st Specialized Department of the Cuxhaven Police Department.

The male suspect, 46-year-old Ali, fled to Germany with his wife and eight children in 2019 and lived on state benefits in a large apartment. However, the media reports indicate that the family lived under a very strict upbringing mandated by the father, who regularly beat his daughters and watched their every move. He forbade them from contacting other boys.

Now, the daughter has also spoken out to Bild, saying: “For five years, my father has been beating us daughters. We are not allowed to speak to boys or have contact with them.”

As a part of their strict regime, they are not allowed to even take photos of themselves or have any part of their body in a photo.

“Once I took one of an ice cream that also had my hand on it. I had to delete it immediately,” she told Bild.

The man is now facing attempted murder charges and remains in custody.

The man is known to the police for other offenses, including a previous assault, which resulted in him being banned from his own apartment for 14 days.

The father repeatedly told the daughters over the years that he wanted to “live in a country where people applaud him when he kills his daughter—not in a country where he goes to prison for it.”

This is far from the only honor killing in Germany, with numbers soaring since the border was opened in 2015. Since then, a number of high-profile cases have emerged, including within families where the siblings were accomplices to murders.

Last year, a Somali migrant stood trial in Germany accused of stabbing his sister to death with a kitchen knife on her 23rd birthday to restore her honor after disagreeing with her assimilation in Western society.

The prosecution also submitted evidence of two handwritten notes found during a search of the defendant’s home after the arrest in which he wrote, “My sister is trying to be a slut” and “I can live without a future but not without honor.”