Saman Abbas, the Court of Cassation: "It was coldly premeditated murder, they had already dug his grave"

The murder of Saman Abbas was not a crime of impulse, nor a tragedy consummated in the wake of a sudden quarrel or an uncontrolled reaction that erupted in the night between 30 April and 1 May 2021. The elimination of the 18-year-old, however, was "coldly elaborated and shared in a much earlier and dating era".

This is what the judges of the first criminal section of the Supreme Court wrote in the reasons for the sentence which made the sentences definitive for the murder of the young Pakistani girl killed in Novellara, in the province of Reggio Emilia and buried in a grave dug in the ground of a country house near her home.

In July, the supreme judges rejected the appeals of the accused family members, confirming the four life sentences inflicted on 18 April last year by the Court of Appeal of Bologna on the girl's parents, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen and on her cousins Noman ul Haq and Ijaz Ikram, accused of murder and suppression of a corpse in addition to the 22-year prison sentence decided on her uncle, Danish Hasnain, who had been sentenced to 14 in the first instance years.

The "stoats", in the sentence, therefore overturn the judgment expressed in the first instance by the Court of Assizes of Reggio Emilia, which had excluded the aggravating circumstance of premeditation. "The intention to kill arose and was maintained over time, but its execution was subordinated to Saman's decision to leave, this time definitively, the family unit and escape its control", we read in the 100 pages of the reasons.

For the Court of Cassation, the advance planning was demonstrated by two key findings: the purchase of one-way plane tickets to Pakistan by the parents already on 28 and 29 April, and the digging of the grave in the countryside of Novellara, which took place before the young woman was murdered. A tomb that was initially too small, which forced the executors to widen the walls by creating two side niches (the "sgrotti") precisely because they did not yet have the girl's body available to take her exact measurements.

The Supreme Court also firmly established the aggravating circumstance of abject motives. "The aggravating circumstance of the abject motive is murder with the suppression of a corpse committed to punish the victim who has exercised his freedom of self-determination in emotional and personal choices" and "the reference to cultural, religious or family traditions cannot exclude the ignoble nature of the motive, as such conceptions must give way in the face of the protection of the fundamental rights of the person recognized by the constitutional system".

Then the thesis of the mother being subservient or extraneous to the action also falls apart. Nazia Shaheen, with "uncommon determination", the judges write, "accompanied her daughter to die, leading her, unaware, towards the little road where the other relatives were waiting for her for the physical execution".

Finally, the life sentence for the cousins ​​Noman and Ijaz was validated, acquitted at first instance but then nailed on appeal and in cassation by the testimonies of their brother Ali Haider, by the compatibility of the shovels seized from their home, by the biological traces and by their hasty escape abroad.

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The ruling, in addition to putting an end to the legal matter, condemns the five defendants jointly and severally to pay the court costs and to reimburse the court costs in favor of the civil parties, including the municipality of Novellara, the Union of Islamic Communities of Italy (Ucoii), brother Ali Haider and anti-violence associations.