Last farewell today at the Ancona mortuary to the 15-year-old Bengali girl who died in recent days in Ancona after a flight from the third floor of the house where she lived with her family: her parents, an older sister in turn with her husband and young children, and an older brother . For that death, the Ancona Prosecutor’s Office opened a case for incitement to suicide against her father, a worker in a shipyard in the city. The suspicion is that behind that extreme gesture there was the teenager’s fear of an arranged marriage in his country of origin, Bangladesh. Today, however, the family found themselves desperate to attend a short ritual to say their last goodbyes to the little girl.
In the morning, at 9.30 the body was washed by a female imam, because only a woman can see another naked. At 11 o’clock everyone turned towards Mecca, lined up, lined up, outside the morgue and said a short prayer that lasted less than a minute, “a sort of greeting for death, for the sake of Allah” was explained to the journalists. Then the mother and older sister entered, together with another woman, all wearing veils. When the mother came out, hugging her son, she was screaming. The father came out, supported by two friends, very shaken.
About a hundred people gathered outside the morgue, mostly Bangladeshis, with a few Italians.
The brother addressed the journalists harshly: “We don’t even know what happened and we want the truth. In our community – he insisted – there are also bad people, who said bad things about my father, they are not nice people those.
The Prosecutor’s Office investigates, yes, but then we have to see if what they say is true. If it’s not true, what happens?”. Then he gave in: “For us now is the time of pain, which we don’t wish anyone to experience, not even our worst enemy.”
Interviewed yesterday by some journalists, the father denied that there was any possibility of an arranged marriage. “It’s not true,” he said, “my daughter was too young to get married, she was little more than a child.” Yet the juvenile prosecutor’s office and the social services of the Municipality of Ancona had dealt with the case in recent months. The girl who was in eighth grade at the time had confided in a teacher: she feared that they would make her marry against her will and that they would make her stop studying. The Marche Minors’ Prosecutor’s Office had ordered a ban on the teenager from leaving the country and the social services had activated a process with a family counseling center to assess the suitability of the parents to exercise parental responsibility. Her father in particular was very collaborative and the process ended positively, with the 15-year-old enrolling in the first year of a professional institute: she dreamed of working in fashion. Instead, her coffin will leave by plane from Rome for Bangladesh on Tuesday.
Today, together with the family, there was also the father’s lawyer, the lawyer Jacopo Casini Ropa. “There were no particular tensions at home, it’s an extended family and there wasn’t a situation of particular tension – he observed -. Not even they can understand what happened. Today this little girl is everyone’s daughter, in a moment of great ache”.