Appeals rejected as Saman Abbas’ murder convictions become final

Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation – the country’s highest appeals court – rejected appeals against the life sentences handed down to the relatives of Saman Abbas, the 18-year-old Pakistani teenager who was murdered in 2021 after refusing an arranged marriage, Italian media reported on Wednesday.

Read: Pakistani couple sentenced to life in Italy for killing daughter

Abbas was living in Novellara near Bologna when she disappeared in May 2021 after rejecting her family’s demands the previous year that she marry a cousin in Pakistan. She had reported her parents to the police, after which social workers placed her in a shelter in November 2020. However, she returned to visit her family in April 2021 to collect her passport and start a new life with her boyfriend, whom her family rejected. She disappeared soon after. Police, alerted by her boyfriend, raided the family home in May, but her parents had already left for Pakistan. According to footage from surveillance cameras, Abbas is believed to have been killed on the night between 30 April and 1 May. The footage showed five people leaving the family’s home with shovels, crowbars and buckets before returning around two and a half hours later.

Also read: Father extradited from Pakistan to Italy in ‘honour killing’ case

Her body was discovered a year later in an abandoned farmhouse with a broken neck. Her father, Shabbar Abbas, was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to Italy in August 2023. In 2024, her mother was arrested in Azad Kashmir after being on the run for three years. Her uncle, Danish Hasnain, was extradited by French authorities, while her cousins ​​were arrested in Spain. The pair were sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court in 2023, while Hasnain was sentenced to 14 years in prison after accepting a plea deal. He was later sentenced to 22 years in prison. Her two cousins ​​were initially acquitted in the case, which shocked Italy.

Il Sole 24 Ore reported that the Court of Cassation rejected appeals filed by parents and cousins ​​against their life sentences and by the uncle against his 22-year sentence, making the sentences final.

According to the report, prosecutors claimed Abbas was murdered for “opposing an arranged marriage and for adopting a lifestyle her family considered “incompatible” with its traditions.

L’Unione Sarda reported that the defendants were “shown to face the aggravating circumstances with premeditated and frivolous motives”.

It quoted Maria Teresa Manente, head of the legal department at Differenza Donna – an Italian feminist non-governmental organization – and the association’s civil defense lawyer, as saying: “This verdict represents a turning point on a social level, even before a legal one. The Court of Cassation definitively crystallizes what we have argued, as Saman was a woman who was killed in every court because she was killed by a patriarch: punished for escaping the subordinate role imposed by the family order her.

“Her death was not an excess, an impulse, an ‘accident’ from a distant cultural context: it was, as the trial documents themselves reveal, a punishment. The plan to kill her was born the moment Saman dared to assert her right to choose whom she would love, whether she would study, how to dress, how to live. Her freedom was her ‘crime’ of her family in life.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni welcomed the development, saying “a painful legal saga is coming to an end.”

She added: “No sentence can bring back her life, but it is true that those responsible for this barbaric crime have been finally judged. In Italy there is no place for those who presume to deny, in the name of supposed cultural or religious reasons, a woman’s freedom, dignity and life. These are principles from which we will never retreat.”