The sentences of the relatives involved in the honor killing of 18-year-old Saman Abbas were officially upheld by Italy’s Court of Cassation on Wednesday, five years after the Pakistani teenager was murdered for refusing an arranged marriage, Italian officials confirmed.
The judges of the first criminal section of the court rejected appeals issued by members of the Abbas family, upholding the four life sentences issued on April 18 in 2025 by the Bologna Court of Appeal and the 22 year sentence issued against the victim’s uncle Danish Hasnian.
Hasnain was initially sentenced to only 14 years in prison after accepting a plea bargain, but was later sentenced to 22 years.
Abbas’s parents, Habbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen , and her cousins Noman Ul Haq and Ijaz Ikram were sentenced to life for murder and suppression of a corpse.
The Attorney General of the Court of Cassation, represented by Attorney General Marco Dall’Olio, emphasized that he was dealing with “not a crime of impulse but a premeditated act. That Saman could not decide for herself is clear, manifest, the reconstruction of the facts is unequivocal. Saman, even though she was an adult, could not decide for herself about her life, she could not have a life of her own. A chilling story, a concerted and premeditated act.”
Investigators located Abbas’s body after questioning her uncle in Paris
Abbas was murdered on the night between April 30 and May 1, 2021, in Novellara di Reggio Emilia. Her body was discovered 18 months after her boyfriend reported her missing.
Investigators finally discovered the location of Abbas’s body after her uncle was detained and questioned in Paris. Both of Abbas’s parents fled to Pakistan shortly after the murder and were extradited in 2023 after being sentenced in absentia in 2021. Her cousins, however, were arrested in Spain.
Abbas moved to northern Italy from Pakistan as a teenager, where she quickly adapted to Western culture, a shift that deeply angered her family. She chose not to wear an Islamic head covering and posted photos online of herself kissing her boyfriend, whom she had told she feared for her life after refusing her parents’ demands that she marry an older cousin in Pakistan.
Before her death, she spent several months living under the care of social services but eventually returned to her family home. Some reports indicated that her return to the family home was only intended to be brief, to collect her personal documents.
PM Meloni, ‘ A painful judicial saga comes to a close’
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that “With the final verdict for the murder of Saman Abbas, a painful judicial saga comes to a close. Saman, a young woman of Pakistani origin in Italy, was killed by her parents and some relatives after she opposed a forced marriage and asserted her right to freely choose her own future.
“No verdict can bring her life back, but it is right that those responsible for this barbaric crime have been definitively convicted. In Italy, there is no room for those who presume to deny, in the name of supposed cultural or religious justifications, a woman’s freedom, dignity, and life. These are non-negotiable principles from which we will never retreat.
“My thoughts go to Saman. May she finally rest in peace.”
