"I saw her vanish into the darkness, I didn't kill her."
Saman Abbas' mother speaks out for the first time and, crying, says that she did not kill her daughter. Her father also reiterated that he and his wife had nothing to do with it and that in his opinion the uncle and cousins were responsible.
The two spouses then denied the words of the younger son and brother of Saman, the accuser of his own family .
Stories that become tangled and contradict each other at the end of the statements of the three main defendants, heard in the appeal trial for the crime. The girl's uncle, considered the material perpetrator of the crime, said in the last hearing that he had no idea who had killed her but that he had learned, from Pakistan, that it was her parents . However, he knew where she was buried, so much so that he indicated it to the investigators. And the ones who dug the hole were Saman's two cyguns, who for the moment are silent but in two weeks they could choose to add their version of the facts.
No one, except the victim's brother, who is not a defendant, directly accuses the others, but the "clan", as the Reggio Emilia Prosecutor's Office called it, has broken up . Four years after the girl's death, the trip to Pakistan for her parents, the escape to France and Spain for the other three relatives, we are getting closer to the day of reckoning.
Also because there is a life sentence at stake: from here the father and mother, Shabbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen, started, extradited from their country of origin at different times and sentenced in Reggio Emilia to the maximum penalty in December 2023. Uncle Danish, who according to the Prosecutor's Office would be the material executor, instead received a sentence of 14 years, while the two cousins, Nomanhulaq Nomanhulaq and Ikram Ijaz, were acquitted and are participating in the appeal in Bologna at liberty . The Reggio sentence has in fact exonerated them, eliminating premeditation, in a reading of the facts according to which father, uncle and mother would be "equally involved" in the crime, which matured in the frenetic escalation of the evening of April 30, 2021, when Saman decided to leave. Without excluding the possibility that it was the mother herself who committed it, the last person the cameras filmed near her daughter , outside the house in Novellara.
The woman, who spoke for the first time today, said in tears: " We went out together, I saw Saman who was walking very quickly. Then I saw him disappear, vanish into the darkness. I did not kill my daughter. I feel dead and until I die I will spend my life crying. I only saw her walk away. If I had seen something I would have fought to stop any kind of aggression towards her, because I am a mother."
No change of heart for the husband either. "I want to clarify that we parents did not kill our daughter. I have been in great pain, from the moment I found out until today. I will be in it for the rest of my life." As the wife said, " we left the house, she (Saman) went out into the street, it was dark, we didn't see anything ." So who was it? "I heard Danish say that he and the other two were there, so I think it was the three of them."
Shabbar also reiterated what she had already said in the first instance: shortly before her daughter left she had heard her calling in the bathroom. "She said: 'come and get me'. I thought she was talking to her boyfriend and that's why I called Danish and told him: 'teach him a lesson, but don't hit him too much'. He replied: 'we'll take care of it'". Why, a civil party lawyer asked, didn't she take care of it herself? "I had back pain" , was the answer.
(Online Union)
