SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Wajiha Korashi was living among fellow Afghan refugees in Elk Grove when federal agents swooped in last May, detaining the mother of two in a gruesome murder case that raises questions of transnational law enforcement, honor killings and the trauma of war.

Details of the case are murky. The Swedish government, which is seeking to extradite Korashi and her husband in the case of a man whose body was found in a duffel bag in the woods near Stockholm, redacted the name of the victim and did not offer specific details of how the crime was committed.

But prosecutors say that Korashi, who fled Afghanistan to Sweden in 2020, was involved in his murder, seeking to purchase date-rape drugs and false passports in advance, and then fleeing through Sweden, Denmark and Germany before winding up in Elk Grove, where her sister lived.

The 25-year-old is being held in the Wayne Brown Correctional Facility in Nevada City. She faces an extradition hearing on Wednesday in Sacramento federal court. Her husband, Farid Vaziri, is wanted by Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency.

Both American prosecutors and the defense say the case has elements of an honor killing, part of a legacy of violence that has followed some Afghan refugees from their war-torn land to other countries. But that association is also somewhat uncertain, experts say, because the victim was a man.

Korashi’s lawyer, federal public defender Mia Crager, does not deny a relationship between Korashi and the victim. But she says her client did not kill him, and that she would be subjected to anti-immigrant bias if returned to Sweden to stand trial. A sworn statement by Swedish prosecutor Cecilia Tepper detailing the crime is full of “mistakes and consistencies” and would not meet U.S. standards for evidence, she said.

“Wajiha Korashi was caught between two men’s jealousy,” Crager said. “She did not plan or execute any murder.”

Lover’s body found in woods near Stockholm

On March 10, police found a body wrapped in plastic bags and stuffed into a traveling bag in the woods north of Stockholm, according to court documents.

His throat had been cut from ear to ear and he was badly bruised, with another laceration on the side of his head. The victim turned out to be a man who had gone missing two days earlier, after telling his brother he was meeting with Korashi, her husband Vaziri and other family members, Swedish prosecutors said. They did not release the victim’s name, although Swedish newspapers said he was Ako Hameed Abbas, 37.

The three were already on investigators’ radar.

A few weeks earlier, they’d picked up the victim in the case after Korashi accused him of raping her. Police quickly let him go, however, saying they found videos of the pair having sex and that he had told his brother he’d been having an affair with Korashi for about six months.

A few weeks after the rape accusation, on Feb. 24, Korashi reached out to an old school friend, prosecutors said. Korashi asked the classmate to help her obtain a drug that she could mix into water or tea in order to render someone unconscious, Swedish prosecutor Tepper said in court documents.

“”Rohypnol, GHB, Ketamine. Any of them,” she said to the classmate in a text message, Tepper alleged. “Can you find.” The classmate did not provide any drugs, Tepper said.

Around the same time, she called another friend from school and asked to purchase a passport, Tepper said in a statement supporting the extradition request.

“Wajiha offered the witness money, but no amount was discussed because the witness declined to sell Wajiha a passport,” Tepper said.

Soon after, in early March, the victim called his brother in Iraq to tell him he’d agreed to meet with Vaziri and Korashi. The meeting was set for March 7. The next day, March 8, the victim’s relatives reported him missing, and Swedish police began searching for him.

Two days later, on March 10, police went to the couple’s apartment and found it empty. It had been thoroughly cleaned, but forensic investigators found traces of blood on a leg of the living room sofa and in the bathroom, Swedish authorities said.

A day later, they found the victim’s body, about 9 miles from where the couple lived in Nacka, a suburb of the Swedish capital. The cause of death was the gash across his throat, sharp and deep, the medical examiner said in an autopsy report.

Clues led investigators back to Korashi and Vaziri: Fibers found in the carpet of the couple’s apartment matched the pants the victim was wearing. And Korashi’s cellphone had been used for about 30 minutes near the woods where the body was found, Tepper said in her statement shared by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Witnesses reported seeing a gray 1990s-era Volkswagen Passat in the area where the body had been dumped, and a taxi driver who knew Korashi told police he had rented her a car matching that description.

The family appears to have fled in haste — the taxi driver said he drove them to Sweden’s border on March 8. Korashi’s older brother, identified in documents as Sayed Rija Korashi, met them there and surveillance cameras captured his Mercedes-Benz crossing the Oresund Strait into Denmark.

Two weeks later, Sayed Rija Korashi was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents about 150 yards past the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego, U.S. court documents said.

Also in court documents, U.S. authorities said the specific time and manner of Korashi’s and Vaziri’s entry into the United States was unknown. However, officials said in the criminal complaint against Korashi that they believe the couple had also crossed the border with their children, possibly using identification documents belonging to other people.

The family made its way to Elk Grove, where Korashi was arrested two months later. Vaziri’s whereabouts are not disclosed in the court documents, and prosecutors would not say where he is or where the couple’s children are.

Was lover’s killing for honor or revenge?

Tepper, the Swedish prosecutor, said the case had elements of so-called honor killings, the practice of killing women who are believed to have dishonored their families. Such a connection would be more likely to make Korashi a victim rather than a perpetrator, Crager argued in her brief. For example, she said, police evidence that Korashi’s phone was used near where the body was found could simply be evidence that her husband and brothers had taken the phone from her as a way to punish her for perceived dishonor.

But honor killings almost always involve the killing of women, not men, said Sahar Razavi, director of the Iranian and Middle Eastern Studies Center at Sacramento State. If the family believed that the relationship was not consensual, however, the incident could have been what is known as a revenge killing, she said.

“In the case of rape then it would be the man violating the family’s honor,” Razavi said. If it was a revenge killing, Korashi’s life might have been spared, but at the cost of the victim’s life, she said.

Honor killings have followed Afghan women from their war-torn homeland to the sometimes impoverished communities where millions have fled over four decades of instability that started with the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and most recently was capped by the U.S. withdrawal of troops in 2020, Razavi and Crager said.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that about 5.3 million Afghans have been displaced in that time, upheaval that has also led to violence in refugee communities, Razavi said

“We know that violence thrives in places of scarcity and we know that violence thrives when communities are disrupted,” she said.

Extradition hearing standards differ from prosecution

Whether there is an honor killing component to the case, federal prosecutors in Sacramento do not need to prove that Korashi participated in the murder to win an order from a judge extraditing her to Sweden.

Under the rules governing extradition, determination of guilt or innocence would be up to Sweden’s judicial system. The U.S. prosecutors arguing Sweden’s case on Wednesday only have to show that the evidence presented is enough for Sweden to reasonably charge her with the crimes of murder and “gross offense against the peace of the grave.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Audrey Hemesath, the federal prosecutor assigned to the case, declined to comment. In her brief in support of the extradition, she said that the evidence presented by the Swedish government in the case should be enough to persuade the court to hand Korashi over.

But Crager says that would be unfair.

“There is no evidence that Ms. Korashi was there,” Crager wrote. “There is no evidence that she packed or moved the corpse, or that she transported it.”

U.S. Marshals, who also investigated aspects of the case, found that furniture shipments had been made to Elk Grove by the family as early as January, Crager said, indicating that the move had been planned.

Under the rules set up by the extradition treaty with Sweden, Korashi can’t examine the evidence against her, or test as she would be able to in a typical U.S. court.

“Although she is in America, Ms. Korashi is not permitted to access the adversarial fact-finding process that is the bedrock of the American justice system,” Crager said.

____

©2024 The Sacramento Bee. Visit at sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.