ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani police, working closely with Interpol, raided a house in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir and arrested a Pakistani woman convicted in Italy of killing her daughter, officials said Friday.
Nazia Shaheen was arrested in a village in Pakistani-administered Kashmir on Thursday and was produced before a judge in Islamabad on Friday, Federal Investigation Agency and police officials said.
Islamabad police confirmed the arrest and other Pakistani officials said Interpol was helping police track the woman.
Officials say the Pakistani government will soon start the process of extraditing her to Italy, where a court last year convicted Shaheen, her husband and an uncle of killing Saman Abbas, an 18-year-old Pakistani woman.
The woman was killed after rejecting her family’s demands to marry a cousin in their home country.
Arranged marriages are the norm among many conservative Pakistanis, and hundreds of women are murdered every year in so-called honor killings, committed by husbands or relatives as punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behavior.
Abbas’ body was exhumed from an abandoned farm near the fields where her father worked in northern Italy in November 2022 – a year and a half after she was last seen alive on surveillance video while walking with her parents near the same fields ran. Italian police had said she was murdered by her family on May 1, 2021.
Her parents flew from Milan to Pakistan after the murder.
Since then, Pakistani police have been trying to track down Shaheen, whose husband Shabbar Abbas was arrested in Pakistan in 2022. He was later extradited to Italy, where a court sentenced him to life in prison in 2023.
Shaheen was tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison.
Abbas’ uncle, Danish Hasnain, was sentenced to fourteen years in prison by a court in Reggio Emilia.
Italy has already concluded that Abbas’ two cousins were not guilty of her murder and have been released from prison. The father of the murdered woman, who was extradited from Pakistan in August, professed his innocence during a tearful statement in court before the deliberations.
The trial was the most high-profile of several criminal investigations conducted in Italy in recent years into the killings or abuse of immigrant women or girls who rebelled against the family’s insistence on marrying someone chosen for them.
After Abbas’ murder, an autopsy revealed that the young woman had a broken neck bone, possibly caused by strangulation. She had emigrated from Pakistan as a teenager to a farming town, Novellara, in Italy’s northern Emilia-Romagna region.
Authorities in Italy have said she quickly embraced Western customs, including throwing off her headscarf and dating a young man of her choice. In a social media post, she and her Pakistani boyfriend were shown kissing on the street in the regional capital Bologna.
According to Italian investigators, that kiss infuriated Abbas’ parents, who wanted her to marry a cousin in Pakistan. Abbas reportedly told her boyfriend that she feared for her life over her refusal to marry an older man in her home country.
