http://www.adnkrono s.com/AKI/ English/CultureA ndMedia/? id=1.0.230485767 5
Alessandria, 2 July (AKI) – A 15-year-old Pakistani girl was hospitalised
after reportedly jumping from a balcony in the northern Italian town of
Alessandria.
She had refused an arranged marriage with a 16-year-old Pakistani.
“My parents had already been in touch with his and told me I would be
marrying him. I have nothing against him but I do not love him,” Turin-based
La Stampa daily quoted the girl as telling police from her hospital bed on
Wednesday.
La Stampa called the girl ‘Piccola’ and said medics had operated on
fractures to her legs sustained after falling from the family’s balcony onto
a roof below.
Piccola, who has grown up in Italy, is said to be well integrated here. She
wears western-style clothes and has Italian schoolfriends.
“I told my parents that I didn’t love the boy and why should I live with
him?” Piccola reportedly told the police.
Piccola said she did not reproach her parents for their choice, but said she
had felt desperate to escape the fate they had chosen for her.
Neighbours described Piccola and her family as “good, really polite people,
all of them.”
The neighbourhood of Alessandria the family lives in, Cristo, is respectable
and is home to generations of immigrants, La Stampa reported.
The previous centre-left Italian government issued a ‘charter of values’ for
immigrants after the tragic case of another young Pakistani girl, Hina
Saleem who was murdered by male relatives in August 2006.
Hina’s father Mohammed, confessed to slitting 20-year-old Hina’s throat for
‘dishonouring the family’ because she lived with an Italian man, wore jeans
and worked in a pizzeria.
Mohammed and two male relatives were each sentenced last year to 30 years in
jail for Hina’s murder. A blue-collar worker, Mohammed had been living in
Italy as a legal immigrant for decades and was in the process of applying
for Italian citizenship.
