Saman’s mother gives consent to extradition

Ten months passed between the capture and the arrival in Italy of Shabbar Abbas. The extradition of his wife Nazia Shaheen could be much quicker, because Saman’s mother, arrested on May 31 in Pakistan after three years on the run, unlike what her husband had done, did not oppose the procedure, nor did she request released on bail, during the closed-door hearing before the Islamabad District Court. At this point we are awaiting further developments to know the delivery times.
Before Christmas 2023, the 51-year-old woman was sentenced in first instance in Reggio Emilia to life imprisonment for the murder of her 18-year-old daughter. The same sentence was given to the spouse, while a third defendant, Danish Hasnain, Saman’s uncle, got a 14-year sentence. However, the young victim’s two cousins, Nomahulaq Nomanhulaq and Ikram Ijaz, were acquitted. The filing of the appeal documents is expected in these days, for the second round of proceedings which promises to be intense.
Nazia’s arrest was the latest investigative result, also the result of diplomatic work. All traces of her had been lost since, the morning after her crime, on May 1, 2021, she left with her husband Shabbar on a one-way ticket, from Milan Malpensa to Lahore.
The extradition request for both was signed by the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia on 23 September 2021. But reaching and capturing first him and then her was complex and equally complicated was obtaining a historic extradition for the girl’s father.
The mother, according to the judges, may have been the perpetrator of the crime. A murder which, according to the prosecution, the Reggio Emilia prosecutor’s office and the carabinieri, was a punishment for her rebellion, which began with her refusal of an arranged marriage with a relative in Pakistan. While the judges gave a different reading: Saman would have been killed at the height of a dramatic evening, when her parents had discovered her intention to escape from the house in Novellara where she had returned for some time. And her mother, captured in the last images of her with her daughter on the driveway of her home, would have accompanied her to die. During the minute she stepped out of the focus of the cameras.
The Court had essentially reread, reducing it, the story of the 18-year-old Pakistani girl found in a grave a year and a half after her death and buried in the Novellara cemetery since 26 March. Without sparing criticism of the accusatory reconstruction, of the media which allegedly emphasized and distorted the story, and demolished characters such as her brother and her boyfriend. “Not only was Saman’s life ended unfairly and too soon, but she was surrounded by false and manipulative affections, in a loneliness that leaves one astonished.”