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 outlets 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 begin a new life with her boyfriend, whom her family disapproved of. She disappeared soon afterwards. Police, alerted by her boyfriend, raided the family home in May, but her parents had already left for Pakistan. According to surveillance camera footage, Abbas was believed to have been killed on the night between April 30 and May 1. The footage showed five people leaving the family home carrying shovels, crowbars and buckets before returning about 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 remaining on the run for three years. Her uncle, Danish Hasnain, was handed over by French authorities, while her cousins were arrested in Spain. The couple was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Italian court in 2023, while Hasnain was sentenced to 14 years in prison after accepting a plea bargain. He was later sentenced to 22 years. Her 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, making the convictions final.

According to the report, prosecutors argued that 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 “found to face the aggravating circumstances of premeditation and frivolous motives”.

It quoted Maria Teresa Manente, head of the legal department at Differenza Donna — an Italian feminist non-governmental organisation — and the association’s civil defence attorney, as saying: “This ruling represents a turning point on a social level, even before a legal one. The Court of Cassation definitively crystallises what we have argued in every court: Saman was killed because she was a woman who rebelled against patriarchal rules, punished for escaping the subordinate role 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 the very moment 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 its punishment.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni welcomed the development, saying that “a painful judicial saga comes to a close.”

She added: “No verdict can bring her life back, but it is right that those responsible for this barbaric crime have been definitively convicted. In Italy, there is no room for those who presume to deny, in the name of supposed cultural or religious justifications, a woman’s freedom, dignity, and life. These are non-negotiable principles from which we will never retreat.”