The Honor Killing of Saman Abbas
Posted on June 14, 2021
Earlier this month I posted about the presumed honor killing of a Pakistani girl in Italy by members of her extended family. The body of Saman Abbas has yet to be found, but her parents have decamped to Pakistan without her, and her little brother has told the authorities that she was killed for refusing an arranged marriage with a cousin.
Below is a video update on the case from Italian television. Many thanks to Gary Fouse for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:
Video link
The following article from Il Giornale (also translated by Gary Fouse) reports on Saman’s cousin Ikram Ijaz, who is now in police custody:
Saman’s cousin knows everything and remains silent: “I will talk in the future…”
In jail, Ikram Ijaz is not responding to GIP [Giudice di Indagine Preliminare, Preliminary Investigations Judge]: “Nothing to do with the end of my cousin”
by Nino Materi
June 12, 2021
After so many hours spent with his two lawyers to “fine-tune the defense strategy”, here is the result: “I avail myself of the right not to respond.” Ikram Ijaz, 28, a cousin of Saman Abbas, yesterday passed the translated sentence to the interpreter who relayed it to GIP and to the prosecutor who are investigating the disappearance of the 18-year-old Pakistani, killed by a family conspiracy and made to disappear who knows where. For about six weeks her body has been searched for in the fields around the agriculture business “Le Valli” in Novellara (Reggio-Emilia) where the Abbas family lived and where the young girl was seen for the last time April 29.
Yesterday was supposed to be the day of truth; it was, instead, the day of silence. The 28-year-old is accused of premeditated homicide (with others) and hiding a cadaver together with the uncle, Danish Hasnain (suspected of strangling Saman), along with another cousin, Nomanulhaq Nomanulhaq, and the parents of the victim: the father, Shabbar Abbas, and the mother, Nazia Shaheen. All four are fugitives. (The parents have fled to Pakistan, the other two are in flight in Europe.) Ikram Ijaz, the only one of those charged who is in jail, is one of the three who was captured by a security telecamera on April 30 as they walked away from the Abbas farmhouse carrying a shovel, crowbar, bucket, and plastic bags. The prosecutorial hypothesis is that the three (Ijaz, the other cousin, and the uncle) were going to bury the remains of Saman. A reconstruction of which Ijaz yesterday laconically distanced himself saying that he “had nothing to do with Saman’s disappearance”. But then what was he doing in that film? Why did he then flee to France? Two key questions that Ijaz would have been able to answer, dispelling any doubt about his involvement in a crime hatched by the same parents of Saman to punish their daughter, who was “guilty” of not having accepted an “arranged marriage” and of not comporting herself as a “good Muslim”. Instead, Ijaz — arrested on May 29 in France and extradited to Italy last week — when face-to-face with investigators in the Reggio Emilia jail did not respond to questions while pointing out that he was “willing to cooperate”. His lawyers note: “He has shown the intention of making more in-depth statements to the prosecutor in the coming days.” Then why not begin doing so immediately? The dilatory technique is a classic of the defense to understand what the prosecution has in hand: stalling is considered by defendants as an almost obligatory strategy. Still, in this case, the evidentiary picture is quite defined, and to crystallize it completely, only the discovery of the body of Saman is missing. (But that is not a small detail.).But this sentence, terrible, spoken by one of those charged — “We have done a good job” — is there to demonstrate how difficult it will be to recover the remains of the girl. Up until now, cadaver dogs and georadar have not obtained the hoped-for result. It is not excluded that the cadaver could have been dismembered into several parts and hidden in various places.
Meanwhile, the lawyers of the only charged person in jail (the parents of Saman have fled to Pakistan, while the uncle and the other cousin of the victim are fugitives in another country) maintain that their client “does not understand Italian well,” and therefore, for this reason, the time of “cooperation” risks “becoming longer”. The feeling instead is that Ijaz knows a lot — if not everything — about the sad fate of Saman. But that he has decided, at least for now, to keep his mouth shut. Perhaps out of fear of revenge. Perhaps because he wants “guarantees”. Or perhaps, more simply, because he has no conscience.
Another article from Il Giornale (also translated by Gary Fouse) discusses the reluctance of Italian politicians to mention JIM:
“Saman victim of femicide”. Letta & Co. are afraid to say Islam.
For the Democrats, the murder of Saman is femicide, while for Leu, arranged marriages are “barbaric, patriarchal practices”. Nobody can say Islamic fundamentalism.
by Andrea Indini
June 10, 2021
The latest linguistic up-and-down is the work of Enrico Letta. After days of exhausting silence, in which he must have thought incessantly how to express himself, he has relegated the alleged murder of Saman Abbas to the category of “femicide”. “For us, there is the strongest condemnation of what appears to be a brutal femicide,” he said yesterday morning to the microphones of “Coffee Break” on La7. “There is no possibility of tolerating these events; I do not question the need to commit everyone to the rules being respected by all.” Not one word on the religious matrix of the crime, not one word about Islamic fundamentalism, which pushes parents to organize arranged marriages and punish daughters who rebel. On the left, the PD [Partito Democratico] is not the only one to spin the Italian language not to call by name the Islamic fury, which in Italy, has taken the life of another girl. It is as if everyone is afraid to pronounce the word Islam.
If we look at the statements of recent days, the embarrassment of the Left in the face of the case of the young woman from Novellara appears evident. The first reaction was silence. We have written about this in the past few days. A silence of guilt and complicity. Now, however, pressured by the center-right, the supporters of integration at all costs are seen to be forced to take positions. The result has been nothing less than catastrophic. Here are some examples among the Democrats: “If this event is confirmed as femicide, it will be treated with the maximum harshness” (Enrico Letta); “It is intolerable that in our country, in the homeland of rights, there exist zones of shadow in which traditional, parallel and bloody ‘laws’ are applied.” (Debora Serracchiani); The event is troubling and no ‘cultural’ alibi can be given for what in Italy we identify in one manner: femicide and hateful violence against women.” (Alessandra Moretti); “I feel horror for what is a crime against nature, raised in a patriarchal and obscurantist family context more concerned with its own honor than the happiness of its own daughters” (Lia Quartapelle); “The condemnation is clear and in no uncertain terms and confirms the justness of our battle to sustain liberty for all women of whatever culture, people, or religion.” (Stefania Pezzopane).
Also within the 5 Star Movement [party] and Liberi e Uguale (Leu — Free and Equal), the tones used are similar. Erasmo Palazzotto, for example, lashing out against the laxity of the institutions that do not sufficiently combat Islamic radicalism, spoke of “timidity with which we avoid combatting barbaric, patriarchal practices everywhere and by whomever the perpetrators are”. Also, the Grillini parliamentarians, who form part of the group Pari Opportunita [Equal Opportunity], have denounced the cultural legacies that undermine the emancipation and rights of girls who “live in our country and are perfectly integrated into Western culture.” Same script with the PD. Almost all (with the exception of Emannuele Fiano) thus seem to have some allergy to speaking of Islam. But not just that. Many of them are even intolerant of those who instead fight to condemn Islamic fundamentalism. Roberto Calderoli, who has been accused by Pezzopane of caring about women, “just to throw gasoline on the fire of xenophobia and racism to try and create consensus instrumentally”. Also the cartoonist Vauro, speaking with AdnKronos, did not hesitate to lash out against those who, in his opinion, are using the Saman case to “demonize Islam”.
The point, however, is not to simply demonize Islam as a religion, but to ensure that certain practices, such as arranged marriages, female genital circumcision, and imposition of the veil, are banned from our country. To make this happen, it is first necessary to denounce this barbarity without linguistic paraphrases and then approve ad hoc laws to combat radical Islam.
Video transcript:
| 00:00 | | Saman Abbas was 18 years old and wanted to live free, and flee an arranged marriage. | | 00:06 | | Saman Abbas was a Pakistani girl, and her family could not accept disobedience. | | 00:11 | | And so, after the umpteenth quarrel the two parents turned their daughter over | | 00:15 | | to a fierce uncle, much feared, who is believed have first strangled her, | | 00:19 | | then hid her in a grave already prepared, dug the day before. | | 00:23 | | Here are the fields where they are concentrating the search. Imagine so many hectares. | | 00:27 | | It is here where Saman Abbas is believed to be buried, the 18-year-old Pakistani girl | | 00:33 | | who has disappeared without a trace for a month now. —Saman, perhaps, | | 00:36 | | never imagined that her parents would have ordered her death. | | 00:39 | | Perhaps, she hoped for a better future. For this, months earlier, she had asked for help | | 00:43 | | from social services at Novellara. She was accepted | | 00:47 | | in a community near Bologna where she remained 4 months. Then, however, she returned home | | 00:51 | | to her parents. And there ended her flight to liberty. | | 00:56 | | Saman, Saman, who didn’t go out, Saman who couldn’t go to school, | | 01:00 | | who was punished, forced to sleep on the sidewalk outside the house. | | 01:03 | | And this is the residence. You see the police seals, a residence already empty, | | 01:08 | | because we know that all the relatives of Saman Abbas | | 01:12 | | have gone away. They have departed, just at the moment | | 01:15 | | the girl disappeared without a trace. | | 01:18 | | “In my opinion, the uncle strangled her,” confessed the 16-year-old brother | | 01:22 | | intercepted at the border with France, now in a protected location. | | 01:26 | | And he is talking, telling… “The uncle took care of it. He talked about having done a good job,” | | 01:31 | | while the poor Saman was crying, almost fainted from fear. | | 01:34 | | Some hours later, the parents of the girl left Malpensa [Milan Airport] for Pakistan. | | 01:38 | | Just two tickets, purchased the week before. Reached by phone, the father Shabbar denies everything | | 01:43 | | He says that he will return, will explain. That the daughter is in Belgium and is fine. | | 01:47 | | But nobody believes him. The Carabinieri are certain Saman has been killed. |
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