The boyfriend of Saman Abbas, an 18-year-old Pakistani-Italian woman allegedly killed by her family near Reggio Emilia in April-May 2021 for refusing an arranged marriage with an older man in Pakistan, will set up a foundation for other victims of so-called ‘honour’ crimes with any damages he gets from a trial that started against five of her relatives in Reggio Friday, his lawyer said.
Saqib Ayub wants to see justice done for his late girlfriend and will use any damages from standing as a civil plantiff in the proceedings to set up a foundation against ‘honour killing’ and to help victims of forced marriages in her name, his lawyer Claudio Falleti said.
“If we ever get any money, we will use it to open a Saman Foundation to safeguard victims of forced marriages,” Falleti told QB-Il Resto del Carlino newspaper.
The young man will not be present in the courtroom Friday, Falleti said.
“Only I will go. He doesn’t want to see those monsters,” he said, referring to three of the five defendants who will be in the dock: Danish Hasnain, Saman’s uncle, and her two cousins Ikram Ijaz and Nomanhulaq Nomanhulaq.
Missing will be the late young woman’s mother, Nazia Shaheen, still on the run in Pakistan, and her father Shabbar Abbas, in jail in Pakistan, which has yet to grant his extradition to Italy.
Falleti called the delays in the extradition process “unacceptable”.
o judicial sources.
On January 31 Saman’s uncle, Hasnain, accused by his nephew, Saman’s brother, of strangling her, said that he did not do the deed but did accompany the young woman’s two cousins, Nomanhulaq and Ijaz, to bury her body together near the family home at Novellara near Reggio Emilia, according to judicial sources.
On November 2018 Hasnain took police to the place near the family home where they buried Abbas after 18 months of vain searches, even with sniffer dogs, because the body was too far down in the ground.
Hasnain, the uncle, reportedly told police her cousins blamed the mother for the murder but he did not think she had done it either.
On January 4 Saman’s body was ID’d from her teeth, said a lawyer for the Penelope missing persons and women’s rights group who is also a civil plaintiff in the trial.
The lawyer, Barbara Iannucelli, said a bone in Abbas’s neck had been broken and further examination will be needed to establish if this injury was inflicted pre- or post-mortem.
The fracture of the bone in the front of the neck would support the hypothesis that she was strangled by her uncle, as he has been charged.
The alleged ‘honour killing” was perpetrated, police said, because of Saman’s refusal to marry the older man in Pakistan and also because the family objected to the western-style life she was living with her boyfriend, Ayub.
Saman had taken refuge in a women’s shelter but her mother lured her back to be killed, police say, by promising her that they would let her live as she wanted.
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