Pakistan with help from Interpol arrest a Pakistani woman convicted of murder in Italy, police say

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani police working closely with Interpol have raided a home 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 Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Thursday and was presented before a judge in Islamabad on Friday, officials at the Federal Investigation Agency and the police said.

Islamabad police confirmed the arrest, and other Pakistani officials said that Interpol helped police in tracing the woman.

Officials say Pakistan’s government will soon start the process to extradite her to Italy, where a court last year convicted Shaheen, her husband and an uncle of murdering Saman Abbas, an 18-year-Pakistani woman.

The woman was killed after she refused her family’s demands to marry a cousin in their homeland.

Arranged marriages are the norm among many conservative Pakistanis, and hundreds of women are killed every year in so-called honor killings carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behavior.

Abbas’ body was dug up in November 2022 in an abandoned farmhouse near the fields where her father worked in northern Italy — a year and a half after she was last seen alive on surveillance video walking near the same fields with her parents. Italian police had said she was was killed by her family on May 1, 2021.

Her parents flew from Milan to Pakistan after the murder.

Since then, Pakistani police had been trying to trace Shaheen, whose husband Shabbar Abbas was arrested in Pakistan in 2022. He was later extradited to Italy, where a court convicted and sentenced him to life in prison in 2023.

Shaheen was tried in absentia and