Appeals rejected as Saman Abbas murder convictions become final

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

Read: Pakistani couple sentenced to life in Italy for the murder of their daughter

Abbas was living in Novellara, near Bologna, when she disappeared in May 2021 after rejecting her family’s request the previous year to 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, of whom her family disapproved. She disappeared shortly after. Police, alerted by her boyfriend, searched the family home in May, but her parents had already left for Pakistan. According to surveillance camera images, Abbas was killed on the night of April 30 to May 1. The footage showed five people leaving the family home with shovels, crowbars and buckets before returning around two and a half hours later.

Read also: Father extradited from Pakistan to Italy in “honor killing” case

His body was discovered a year later in an abandoned farmhouse with a broken neck. His father, Shabbar Abbas, was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to Italy in August 2023. In 2024, his mother was arrested in Azad Kashmir after three years on the run. His uncle, Danish Hasnain, was handed over by French authorities, while his cousins ​​were arrested in Spain. The couple were sentenced to life imprisonment 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. His two cousins ​​were initially acquitted in the case, which shocked Italy.

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

According to the report, prosecutors claimed that Abbas was murdered for “his opposition to an arranged marriage and for adopting a lifestyle that his family considered ‘incompatible’ with their traditions.”

The Sarda Union reported that the defendants “face aggravating circumstances of premeditation and frivolous motives.”

Maria Teresa Manente, head of the legal department of Differenza Donna — an Italian feminist non-governmental organization — and the association’s civil defense lawyer, said: “This ruling represents a turning point on the social level, even before the legal level. The Court of Cassation definitively crystallizes what we have argued before all courts: Saman was killed because she was a woman who rebelled against patriarchal rules, punished for having escaped the subordinate role that the family order imposed on 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 at the very moment when Saman dared to assert her right to choose who to love, to study or not, how to dress, how to live. Her freedom was her “crime” in the eyes of her family; her life was her punishment.”

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

She added: “No verdict can restore her life, but it is right that those responsible for this barbaric crime have been definitively condemned. In Italy, there is no place for those who claim to deny, in the name of so-called cultural or religious justifications, the freedom, dignity and life of a woman. These are non-negotiable principles from which we will never back down.”