REGGIO EMILIA – Just over a month after the disappearance of together, the father confessed to the crime during a phone call to a relative in Italy. “I killed my daughter,” he said Shabar Abbas on June 8, 2021, by which time he had fled to Pakistan. The 18-year-old Pakistani girl, for the Reggio Emilia prosecutor’s office, was murdered on the night between 30 April and 1 May a year ago in Novellara. The reason? She turned down an arranged marriage. One of the sparks that exploded the anger of Saman’s parents would have been a photo, published by the young woman between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, of a kiss to her boyfriend during a walk in Bologna, while Saman was a guest of a protected community.
The conversation in which the father admitted to killing his daughter is in the proceedings of the trial that will begin in February 2023 against the family. The civil parties were admitted to the preliminary hearing: the Penelope Association, the mayor of Novellara Elena Carletti and the Union of Italian Islamic Communities (Ucoii). The investigators, prosecutor and carabinieri of Reggio Emilia, are sure cha Saman Abbas she was murdered because she refused to marry a cousin at home and wanted to leave home. Her body was never found, despite months of research in the farm and surrounding land where Saman lived and where her father worked.
The trial began last May. Five relatives sent for trial: the girl’s uncle, Danish Hasnain and the two cousins, Ikram Ijaz e Nomanhulaq Nomanhulaq, arrested in recent months abroad – France and Spain – where they had fled; the parents, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheenfather and mother still fugitives in Pakistan.
The call: “I killed her for my honor”
“For me the dignity of others is no more important than mine (…) – Shabbar said to his relative in the intercepted phone call – I left my son in Italy (Saman’s minor brother now entrusted to a protected community, ndr). I killed my daughter and I came, I don’t give a damn about anyone. “
The same family member, heard by the carabinieri on 25 June of that year, reported that Saman’s father had called him to tell him not to talk about him. “I am already ruined – the words of Abbas in the story of the relative – you have talked about me around, I will not leave your family alone”. And again: “I am already dead, I killed her, I killed her for my dignity and my honor. We killed her”, without giving specific names, but meaning by ‘we’, he explained. always the relative to the carabinieri, the family context.
Simone Servillo, lawyer of Saman Abbas’s father, brakes, in an interview with Fanpage: “From those excerpts one cannot
get nothing, I even read that there is someone who speaks of confession, but there we do not even really know who the interlocutor is and the excerpts that have been extrapolated can also be read in a figurative key. Furthermore, we are talking about wiretapping of persons who spoke in Pakistani, perhaps in a dialect: therefore speaking of confession is completely ridiculous “.
Saman Abbas, story of an investigation
The yellow of the disappearance
Saman Abbas, eighteen, disappeared just over a year ago in the Reggio Emilia countryside. The last image of her: a video in which she is seen walking away with her parents towards the fields nine minutes after midnight. Her sneakers and sweatshirt her, niqab up to her feet, her mother Nazia who accompanied her to die.
Saman Abbas, in a video of the Tgr Emilia Romagna records his last minutes of life
The cameras of the farm where the family lived and worked have filmed that strange night walk from which the girl will never return: the backpack she had on her shoulder, yes, in the hand of her father who returned five minutes later. The same cameras, in the previous days, had recorded an unequivocal coming and going of the cousins and the uncle with crowbars and shovels. And four days later also a funeral rite.
The key testimony of the brother
The phases preceding and following the crime have been reconstructed thanks to the testimony of the girl’s younger brother who, heard by the magistrates, revealed the background to the disappearance of his sister. There are many elements in support of the uncle’s guilt in competition with the other family members. Including the story of the meeting that would take place on the afternoon of April 30 to determine how to assassinate Saman. During the meeting – said the 16-year-old – one of the participants said: “I make small pieces and if you want to take it to Guastalla too, and we throw it there, because that’s not good”.
Saman Abbas, the video that frames the uncle and two cousins accused of his murder
The escape of the parents, the capture of uncle and cousins
After Saman’s death, his father and mother fled by plane on a flight from Milan to Pakistan. The Ministry of Justice has submitted the extradition request. The uncle and the cousins tried to lose their tracks a few days after the murder by taking their younger brother with them (stopped and taken to the community). Once the searches were started, the first to be arrested was Ikram Ijaz, who was stopped in France while he was on a bus that would take him to Spain. For the other protagonists of the story, the searches continued both for the accusation of aggravated murder and for the concealment of a corpse.
Danish uncle Hasnain, 34, was then arrested in Paris on 22 September and extradited from France on 20 January. The shovel and the crowbar, he justified himself, were used to do chores in the garden. And the niece? She fled abroad to be free.
The crime was allegedly committed materially by uncle Hasnain, with the authorization of the victim’s parents Shabar Abbas e Nazia Shaheen and the complicity of the girl’s cousins Ikram Ijaz e Nomanhulaq Nomanhulaq. Against him there is the testimony of the girl’s minor brother: “In my opinion he killed her by strangling her, also because when she came home she had nothing in her hand”. And in a chat to a person close to him, Hasnain, 33, wrote: “We did a job well done.”