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The crime shocked Italy. It happened in May 2021, in Novellara, when a Pakistani family planned and perpetrated the murder of one of its members, an 18-year-old girl who refused to enter into an arranged marriage in her country of origin. Saman Abbas rebelled against the imposition of her parents, who intended to marry her to a cousin she did not know of her, and for this reason, with the collaboration of her other relatives, they agreed to kill her and hide her body.
It was her uncle and two of her cousins, also residents of Italy, who a day before the murder dug a hole behind a shed on the agricultural farm where she worked to bury the body. All this, according to the police, with the complicity of her parents.
The perpetrator of the crime was her uncle, who strangled her.
Investigators located him in Paris four months later, and this Monday, the National Police, in collaboration with the Carabinieri, arrested one of the cousins in the Trinitat Vella neighborhood in Barcelona. He is now awaiting judicial disposition to be extradited to Italy, where, for his participation in the illegal retention and murder of the young woman, he faces a life sentence.
The crime, committed in the family with the induction of the parents and the participation of other relatives, reopened the debate in the Pakistani community on the generation of Muslims who challenged some practices such as the one opposed by Saman, by refusing a forced marriage. .
The victim, when she was still a minor, contacted social services and in November 2020 she was transferred to a reception center, after denouncing that her father beat her, but in April of the following year she returned to her family, and a few days later nobody heard from her again.
The police discovered that his parents had traveled to Pakistan, and that five other members of the family - the uncle and the cousins - had left the house with buckets and shovels to return a few hours later.
As detailed by ABC, for the judge, the motive for the murder was rooted in the religion and tradition of the Pakistani family, which did not consent to the young woman's rejection of marriage with a relative who lived in her country of origin, when she had a boyfriend of the same nationality residing in Italy.
