Pak Couple Sentenced in Italy for Killing Daughter Who Rebelled Against Their Marriage Proposal

A Pakistani couple was sentenced to life in prison by a court in northern Italy on Tuesday for the 2021 murder of their daughter after she refused an arranged marriage. The trial was the most high-profile of several criminal probes in the country in recent years.

Saman Abbas, 18, was living in Novellara near Bologna when she disappeared in May 2021, having rejected the previous year her family’s demand that she marry a cousin in Pakistan.

Parents ordered murder

A tribunal in Reggio Emilia in central Italy ruled that the parents ordered the murder and that an uncle had strangled his niece. The uncle was sentenced to 14 years after accepting a plea bargain, while two cousins were acquitted in an affair that shocked the country.

Saman had denounced her parents to the police and social workers placed her in a shelter in November 2020. But she visited her family in April 2021, planning to pick up her passport and start a new life with her boyfriend, whom her family disapproved of.

She Disappeared

She disappeared soon after, and police, alerted by the boyfriend, raided the family home in May but the parents had already left for Pakistan. The young woman was probably killed the night of April 30 to May 1, according to surveillance camera footage showing five people leaving the family home with shovels, crowbars and buckets, before returning two and a half hours later.

A year later Abbas’s body was found in an abandoned farmhouse with a broken neck. Her brother told police that he had overheard his father talking about the murder and that it was the uncle who had killed his sister. The father, Shabbar Abbas, was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to Italy in August 2023. The uncle, Danish Hasnain, was turned over by French authorities while the cousins were arrested in Spain. The four men were present at the trial, but the mother, Nazia Shaheen, is still a fugitive and is believed to be in Pakistan.

Saman’s quick embrace of Western ways, including shedding her headscarf and dating a young man of her choice, was disapproved by her family. 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 she refused to marry an older man back home in Pakistan.

(With agency inputs)