A Pakistani couple accused of ‘honour killing’ their daughter after she refused their demands to marry a cousin in their homeland were jailed for life in Italy yesterday.
The body of 18-year-old Saman Abbas was dug up in November 2022 in an abandoned farmhouse near the fields where her father worked in northern Italy.
This was a year and a half after she was last seen alive on surveillance video walking near the same fields with per parents.
The tribunal in Reggio Emilia in central Italy ruled that the parents ordered the murder, and that an uncle had strangled his niece.
Italian prosecutors had argued that she was was killed by her family on May 1, 2021. A few days later, her parents flew from Milan to Pakistan.
The parents, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen, were sentenced to life in prison, while her uncle, Danish Hasnain, was handed a 14-year prison term after accepting a plea bargain. Two cousins were found not guilty and were released from jail.
Abbas’ father, who was extradited from Pakistan in August, professed his innocence during a tearful statement to the court before deliberations.
His wife, Shaheen, was tried in absentia and is believed to still be in Pakistan.
The trial was the most high-profile of several criminal investigations in Italy in recent years dealing with the slaying or mistreatment of immigrant women or girls who rebelled against family insistence that they marry someone chosen for them.
An autopsy revealed the young woman had a broken neck bone, possibly caused by strangulation, in a case that has shocked the country.
Abbas had emigrated as a teenager from Pakistan to a farm town, Novellara, in Italy’s northern region of Emilia-Romagna.
She quickly embraced Western ways, including shedding her headscarf, getting piercings, wearing eyeliner and dating a young man of her choice.
In one social media post, she and her Pakistani boyfriend were shown kissing on a street in the regional capital, Bologna.
According to Italian investigators, that kiss enraged Abbas’ parents, who wanted her to marry a cousin in Pakistan.
Abbas had reportedly told her boyfriend that she feared for her life, because of her refusal to marry an older man in her homeland.
Abbas had denounced her parents to the police and social workers placed her in a shelter in November 2020. courtesy daily mail.
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