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

The details of the case are obscure. 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, has redacted the victim’s name and has not provided a precise details of how the crime was committed. engaged.

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

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

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

Korashi’s attorney, federal public defender Mia Crager, does not deny the existence of a relationship between Korashi and the victim. But she says her client did not kill her and that she would be subject to anti-immigration bias if she were sent back to Sweden to stand trial. An affidavit from Swedish prosecutor Cecilia Tepper detailing the crime is full of “errors and consistencies” and would not meet U.S. evidentiary standards, she said.

“Wajiha Korashi was caught between the jealousy of two men,” Crager said. “She did not plan or carry out any murder.”

Body of lover found in woods near Stockholm

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

His throat had been cut from ear to ear and he had severe bruising, as well as another laceration to the side of his head. The victim turned out to be a man who had disappeared two days earlier, after telling his brother he was meeting Korashi, her husband Vaziri and other family members, Swedish prosecutors said. They did not release the victim’s name, although Swedish newspapers said it was Ako Hameed Abbas37.

The three men were already on investigators’ radar.

A few weeks earlier, they had arrested the victim after Korashi accused him of raping her. Police quickly released him, however, saying they found videos of the two men having sex and that he had told his brother he had been having an affair with Korashi for about six months.

A few weeks after the rape accusation, on Feb. 24, Korashi contacted a former school friend, prosecutors said. Korashi asked her classmate to help her get a medicine that she could mix with water or tea to render someone unconscious, Swedish prosecutor Tepper said in court documents.

“”Rohypnol, GHB, Ketamine. Any of them,” she told the classmate in a text message, Tepper claimed. “Can you find it.” The classmate did not provide any medication, Tepper said.

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

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

Shortly after, in early March, the victim called his brother in Iraq to tell him that he had 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 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 15 kilometers from where the couple lived. Nacka, a suburb of the Swedish capital. The cause of death was a sharp, deep cut to the throat, the medical examiner said in an autopsy report.

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

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

The family appears to have fled in a hurry: the taxi driver said he had taken them to the Swedish border on March 8. Korashi’s older brother, identified in the documents as Sayed Rija Korashi, met them there and surveillance cameras filmed his Mercedes-Benz crossing the Oresund Strait. in Denmark.

Two weeks later, Sayed Rija Korashi was arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents about 500 feet from the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego, according to U.S. court documents.

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

The family traveled to Elk Grove, where Korashi was arrested two months later. Court documents do not reveal Vaziri’s whereabouts, and prosecutors would not say where he is or where the couple’s children are.

Was the murder of a lover out of honor or revenge?

Tepper, the Swedish prosecutor, said the case contained elements of honor killings, the practice of killing women suspected of dishonoring their families. Such a connection would be more likely to make Korashi a victim rather than a perpetrator, Crager argued in his brief. For example, she said, police evidence that Korashi’s phone was used near where the body was found could simply be proof that her husband and brothers had taken it from her. the phone in order to punish her for a perceived dishonor.

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

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

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

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that approximately 5.3 million Afghans have been displaced At that time, upheaval 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.

Standards for extradition hearings differ from those for prosecutions

Whether there is an element of honor killing in the case, federal prosecutors in Sacramento do not need to prove Korashi participated in the killing to obtain a judge’s order extraditing him to Sweden.

Under the rules governing extradition, the determination of guilt or innocence would be a matter for the Swedish justice system. U.S. prosecutors defending Sweden’s case on Wednesday will only have to demonstrate that the evidence presented is sufficient for Sweden to reasonably charge him with the crimes of murder and “grave breach of the peace of the grave.”

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

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, discovered that furniture shipments had been made to Elk Grove by the family as early as January, Crager said, indicating the move had been planned.

According to the rules established by the extradition treaty with SwedenKorashi cannot examine the evidence against her, nor conduct tests as she would in a typical American court.

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