Italy: Court upholds life sentences for Muslim family that murdered girl in honor killing

In the Qur’an, a mysterious figure, known as Khidr in Islamic tradition, kills a boy in an apparently random and gratuitous attack. He then explains: “And as for the boy, his parents were believers, and we feared that he would overburden them by transgression and disbelief. So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them one better than him in purity and nearer to mercy.” (18:80-81)

And according to Islamic law, “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2).

Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

“Italy upholds sentencing for ‘barbaric’ murderers of honor killed teenager Saman Abbas,” by Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Jerusalem Post, July 16, 2026:

The sentences of the relatives involved in the honor killing of 18-year-old Saman Abbas were officially upheld by Italy’s Court of Cassation on Wednesday, five years after the Pakistani teenager was murdered for refusing an arranged marriage, Italian officials confirmed.

The judges of the first criminal section of the court rejected appeals issued by members of the Abbas family, upholding the four life sentences issued on April 18, 2025, by the Bologna Court of Appeal and the 22-year sentence issued against the victim’s uncle Danish Hasnain.

Hasnain was initially sentenced to only 14 years in prison after accepting a plea bargain, but was later sentenced to 22 years.

Abbas’s parents, Habbar Abbas and Nazia Shaheen, and her cousins Noman Ul Haq and Ijaz Ikram were sentenced to life for murder and suppression of a corpse.

The attorney-general of the Court of Cassation, Marco Dall’Olio, emphasized that he was dealing with “not a crime of impulse but a premeditated act.

That Saman could not decide for herself is clear, manifest; the reconstruction of the facts is unequivocal. Saman, even though she was an adult, could not decide for herself about her life; she could not have a life of her own. A chilling story, a concerted and premeditated act.”…