ROME (AP) — A decide in Italy on Tuesday ordered trial for a number of members of the family of an 18-year-old Pakistani lady who disappeared final 12 months after refusing an organized marriage and was allegedly slain, in response to authorities.
The Italian information company ANSA mentioned Judge Dario De Luca, on the finish of a preliminary listening to, set trial on murder prices to start in the northern city of Reggio Emilia in February 2023.
Saman Abbas, 18, had refused to be married to a cousin in Pakistan as her mother and father, immigrants to Italy, insisted she ought to. She disappeared on April 30, 2021, after telling her boyfriend in Italy that her household was speaking about killing her.
For two months, some 500 Italian cops, aided by canines and drones, searched farm fields close to the city the place her mother and father lived, earlier than ending the hassle to seek out her physique which Italian authorities suspected was buried in a subject.
Ordered to face trial are an uncle who was extradited from France earlier this 12 months, two cousins, and her mother and father, who flew to Pakistan from Milan on May 1, 2021. The mother and father have been seen on a video digicam as they hurried to a check-in counter at Malpensa airport. They will probably be tried in absentia after failing to answer appeals from Italian authorities.
A separate video confirmed the uncle strolling with a shovel and a pitchfork in the countryside close to the household’s dwelling in Novellara. Interrogated by prosecutors after his extradition, the uncle has denied any position in his niece’s disappearance.
In Italy, suspected accomplices to a slaying can face murder prices.
Children of immigrants who develop up in Italy can request Italian citizenship once they flip 18, however Abbas had apparently not executed that.
Growing up in northern Italy, Abbas adopted Western-style costume, abandoning the robes and scarves that her mom wore, and courting a Pakistani youth in Italy who, like her, had additionally adopted Italian methods.