The murder of 18-year-old Pakistani Saman Abbas was premeditated by her family clan, who could not tolerate her desire for autonomy. This is according to the ruling from the Court of Assize of Appeal in Bologna, which sentenced her parents and two cousins to life in prison and her uncle to 22 years.
The court stated the homicidal plan was made by the clan “with cold lucidity and planned for a considerable period of time, finding it unbearable that Saman had decided not only to choose to live her life freely and with full autonomy” but also “in dissonance with the ethical values and religious creed” of the family.
The judges, President Pierluigi Stigliano and drafter Enrico Saracini, detailed in their nearly 500-page reasoning that while Saman’s parents, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen, planned their daughter’s killing “for cultural reasons” and led her to the execution site on the night of April 30, 2021, they were not the material perpetrators of the murder. This diverges from the opinion of the Court of Reggio Emilia, which had identified the mother as a possible perpetrator. The Bologna court noted that Nazia Shaheen stepped out of camera view for only 53 seconds—a timeframe deemed too short to commit a murder, also considering her orderly clothing showed no signs of a struggle.
According to the court, the murder was carried out jointly by her uncle, Danish Hasnain, and cousins, Noman Hulaq and Ikram Ijaz, who were waiting in the dark on a country road near their home in Novellara. Evidence indicates three people were involved: two individuals plus the person who physically strangled the teenager, who was not identified with certainty by the sentence. These same three people are believed to have buried the young woman in a grave dug and subsequently widened earlier.
The criminal behavior of the two cousins, who were acquitted at first instance but given life sentences on appeal, is described as the “indifferent execution of a young girl in a context of uncritical assent to the clan’s determination.” The court found that with their actions, they “made easy the execution of a homicidal plan that, without their consent, would have encountered far greater difficulties in its realization.”
Evidence against the cousins, who proclaimed their innocence in court, includes testimony from Saman’s brother, her father, and her uncle (all co-defendants), who placed them at the crime scene at the time of the murder. Furthermore, shovels likely used to dig the grave where Saman’s body was found a year and a half later, on the uncle’s indication, were discovered in the family home. Additional evidence includes Ijaz’s genetic profile on an item of the uncle’s clothing and the cousins’ precipitous flight abroad before the murder was officially known.
The court also found Saman’s younger brother, the main witness in the trial, to be credible and extraneous to the facts. He provided “an articulated, coherent, and credible reconstruction of the events, at least in their essential core.” The appellate judges painted a picture of a young man living in a country he did not feel was his own, almost exclusively within the microcosm of his family clan, who was suddenly deprived of his sister—a key emotional anchor for him. His position was one of “absolute extraneousness to the criminal concert,” and he was in fact considered an obstacle by his family to the crime’s completion. The court also noted that when he showed his parents Saman’s chats with her boyfriend, the then-16-year-old brother did so believing his sister would at most be reprimanded or punished.