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 imposed on 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 demand 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, of whom her family disapproved. She disappeared shortly after. The police, alerted by her boyfriend, raided the family home in May, but her parents had already left for Pakistan. Based on surveillance camera footage, Abbas is believed to have been murdered on the night between April 30 and May 1. Footage showed five people leaving the family home carrying shovels, crowbars and buckets before returning about two and a half hours later.

Read also: Father extradited from Pakistan to Italy in ‘honour killing’ case

His body was discovered a year later in an abandoned farm with his neck broken. 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 being on the run for three years. His uncle, the Danish Hasnain, was handed over by French authorities, while his cousins ​​were arrested in Spain. The couple 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. His two cousins ​​were initially acquitted in the case, which shocked Italy.

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

According to the report, prosecutors argued that Abbas was killed for “opposing an arranged marriage and for adopting a lifestyle that her family considered “incompatible” with their traditions.

L’Unione Sarda reported that the defendants “were faced with aggravating circumstances of premeditation and frivolous motives.”

Maria Teresa Manente, head of the legal department of Differenza Donna (Italian feminist non-governmental organization) and civil defender of the association, stated: “This ruling represents a turning point on a social level, even before a legal level. The Court of Cassation definitively crystallizes what we have argued in all courts: Saman was murdered because she was a woman who rebelled against patriarchal rules, punished for escaping the subordinate role imposed on her by the family order.

“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 same moment that Saman dared to assert her right to choose who to love, whether to study, 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 the event and said that “a painful judicial saga is coming to an end.”

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