A sordid family drama. A Pakistani man and his wife were sentenced this Tuesday at first instance to life imprisonment for the murder of their daughter, in Italy in 2021, against the backdrop of a forced marriage. The young woman’s uncle was sentenced to 14 years in prison while two cousins, also prosecuted, were acquitted in this case which moved the peninsula.
According to the court of Reggio Emilia, in central Italy, the parents were the instigators of this murder while the uncle was the one who strangled the young woman, but due to an accelerated legal procedure he benefited from a reduced sentence. Saman Abbas, an 18-year-old young woman who lived in Novellara, near Bologna, in northern Italy, disappeared in May 2021. She had refused her family’s request the previous year to marry a cousin in Pakistan.
The mother still on the run
As a minor, she then turned to social services and was placed in a home in November 2020. She reported her parents to the police but returned to see them on April 11, 2021, before disappearing. At the beginning of May, the police found the family home empty; the parents had gone to Pakistan.
The young woman was probably killed on the night of April 30 to May 1, according to video surveillance images on which we can see five people leaving the family home with shovels, crowbars and buckets, returning two and a half hours later. The young woman’s father, Shabbar Abbas, arrested in Pakistan and incarcerated in this country since November 2022, was extradited to Italy in August 2023, while the uncle had been handed over earlier by France to the Italian authorities. The mother is still on the run, while the four men were present at the hearing.