Pakistani couple who killed daughter for refusing to marry cousin jailed for life in Italy

A Pakistani couple was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Italian court for killing their daughter after she refused to marry in 2021.

Saman Abbas and her parents lived in Novellara near Bologna, Italy. Her parents wanted her to marry a cousin in Pakistan. The 18-year-old victim refused to marry him and disappeared in 2021.

A court in central Italy ruled that the parents planned to kill their daughter and her uncle had strangled his niece.

The uncle was sentenced to 14 years for accepting a plea bargain, while two cousins ​​were acquitted in one case.

The victim reported to the police about her parents after which she was placed in a shelter by the social workers in November 2020.

In April 2021, the girl met her family to get her passport and tell her parents about her decision to start a new life with her boyfriend. After the refusal of her parents, she suddenly disappeared, the police raided the girl's house after receiving information from her boyfriend, but the parents had left for Pakistan.

The 18-year-old girl was allegedly murdered probably between April 30 and May 1. According to CCTV footage, five members of the girl's family were seen leaving the house with some tools and about two and a half hours later returned home.

A year later, the dead body of Saman Abbas was recovered from the farmhouse with a broken neck.

The girl's brother told the police that he heard his father talking about the murder and that the uncle had killed his sister.

Father Shabbar Abbas was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to Italy in August this year.

Uncle Danish Hasnain was jailed by the French authorities, while the cousins ​​were arrested in Spain, but the mother, Nazia Shaheen, is still at large.