Muzzammil Hassan had another woman in his life, and he wanted his wife to know.
Whether the relationship was intimate is unknown, but he went out of his way to humiliate his wife with the possibility, Aasiya Zubair Hassan’s sister said. For months, he forced his wife to listen in on his friendly and flirtatious phone banter with the woman, said Asma Firfirey, Aasiya’s sister.
Two days before her death, Aasiya, 37, finally e-mailed that other woman -- an investor in the Bridges TV network the couple founded -- telling her how she suffered while the two of them shared “fun and laughter” at her expense.
That e-mail, which The Buffalo News read, included some snippets of her husband’s cruel and demeaning writings to her, along with a picture of her beaten face and destroyed belongings. She ended her note by referring to her recent divorce filing.
Firfirey rebuked her sister for sending the e-mail, saying it only would put her in greater danger. “I said, ‘You must go and hide somewhere because something is going to happen to you,’” Firfirey said.
These and other details of Aasiya Zubair Hassan’s last days emerge as her husband’s murder trial gets under way.
Nearly two years have passed since Feb. 12, 2009, when Muzzammil Hassan, known as “Mo,” walked into Orchard Park Police Headquarters, told a lieutenant he had killed his wife and handed over the keys to the Bridges cable studio, where her stabbed and decapitated body was found.
Since then, the case has received national attention and attracted talk of an “honor killing.”
Hassan, 46, has maintained that he -- not his wife -- had been the victim of years of psychological torture and physical abuse.
Now, a jury finally will determine whether Hassan, a once-respected cable executive, is a victim or a villain.
Haaris Zubair, Aasiya’s brother, said he hopes Hassan is found guilty of killing his sister and given life in prison.
“Hopefully, he will be behind bars his whole life,” he said from his home in Karachi, Pakistan. “Hopefully, he will not see this world again.”
Erie County Judge Thomas P. Franczyk has cleared the rest of this month for Hassan’s murder trial.
Waiting for justice
Friends and family of the victim, both stateside and abroad, said they await justice.
“This is a beast of a man,” Nishat Aleem Khan, Aasiya’s longtime friend, said of Hassan. “He should not be let out to do this to any other woman. And if he is let go, he will do this again. Maybe not kill, but abuse. Living with abuse is even worse than dying.”
Hassan has fired three defense lawyers in the past two years and now is represented by Jeremy D. Schwartz.
He has engaged in an extensive letter-writing campaign from behind bars. And in a conversation with The News last year, he suggested he might have snapped the day of his wife’s death after years of psychological abuse. He also said he can produce hundreds of e-mails, supposedly authored by his wife, supporting his assertions.
“There are two sides to every story,” Schwartz said Friday. “The only thing that matters is what is proven or not proven over the next few weeks.”
One of Hassan’s previous defense lawyers told the court in September that Aasiya routinely kicked, slapped and struck her husband. At the time of the killing, the attorney said, Hassan feared he never would see his children again and that his wife had threatened to burn down their house and crash his car.
E-mails Aasiya sent to her sister in South Africa, though, paint a different portrait. She said her husband suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, which involves an inflated sense of self-importance, inability to empathize with others, sensitivity to criticism and a predisposition for envy, arrogance, rage and manipulation.
In an e-mail attached to an article on the mental disorder, Aasiya wrote: “Almost everything in this article is true about Mo. I am scared of him. He repeatedly has warned me, ‘If you ever leave me I will make you cry for the rest of your life as you have never cried before.’”
She also stated that his violence led to the loss of two of her pregnancies.
“I cannot afford more losses,” she wrote in 2008. “I have no idea who to turn to for help.”
Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III said he knows of no other case with so much clear-cut evidence that has lingered without a trial for so long.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
Zubair, 42, said the controversy over whether some may consider Hassan’s actions, as those of a Muslim man, to be an “honor killing” is outrageous. Domestic violence is not limited to a single faith or culture, nor is it acceptable in Islam, Zubair and others said.
“That monster,” Zubair said. “I don’t even consider him a Muslim. He’s an atheist. Our religion is not like that.”
Portents of death
Friends and family remain haunted by portents of Aasiya’s death.
Zubair recalled that after his sister miscarried in 2006, her parents and siblings pleaded with her to return to Pakistan, but Aasiya remained terrified her husband would gain sole custody of their two young children.
She was determined to complete her master’s degree in business so she eventually could support her children on her own, friends said.
In 2008, Aasiya fled to South Africa with her young son and daughter. Her sister picked her up at the airport and immediately admitted her to the hospital. While there, Aasiya underwent abdominal surgery and was diagnosed with a fractured jaw and nose, she said.
She described Aasiya’s visit to South Africa and subsequent visit to her parents and siblings in Pakistan as a kind of farewell tour.
“She was in so much trouble. She knew she was going to die,” Firfirey said. “She said, ‘I want to see you before something happens to me.’”
When Aasiya then went to stay with her parents and brother in Pakistan, Zubair said he confiscated his sister’s passport and refused to return it for several days before finally relenting to her demands.
“I lost my best friend in the world, because since our childhood we were close, very close,” Zubair said. “Now, I always feel guilty -- why couldn’t I do anything when she came to Pakistan? Why didn’t I stop her?”
Hassan’s hold over his wife, even at such a distance, was shocking, Zubair said. He would keep her on the phone for hours every day, repeating dire threats.
Khan and other women among Aasiya’s friends, classmates from architecture school, also failed to persuade her to leave her spouse while in Pakistan.
“I was just pleading with her, ‘Don’t go. If you go, he will kill you,’” she said.
Meeting before slaying
But family and friends said Aasiya was convinced her husband could find her anywhere on earth, and she never would be safe. If she didn’t return home, they said, she believed her children would suffer most.
When she did return, however, she began working more actively to end her marriage. She bought a new cell phone, which she used to make unmonitored calls to her family and a divorce lawyer, even as she feared for her life, Zubair said.
“As soon as I file my divorce case, he’ll kill me,” he recalled her telling him in December 2008.
Hours before the slaying, Firfirey said, Hassan took his wife into a closed meeting room at the Bridges studio and spent three hours trying to persuade her to withdraw her divorce filing. Firfirey overheard some of the conversation because Aasiya had surreptitiously turned on her cell phone to let her eavesdrop.
Desperately worried about what might happen, Firfirey said she made a round of calls, pleading with a secretary at Bridges TV, Aasiya’s divorce lawyer and others to break up the meeting or call police to the station.
But Aasiya was adamant about not contacting police, fearing what would happen to the station’s employees and the Bridges network, a Muslim lifestyles channel devoted to bringing greater understanding of the Muslim faith to the broader community.
“She said, ‘No, everybody will lose their jobs, and then they will shut down Bridges TV.’ And I said, ‘Still, you’re concerned about the station? " Firfirey recalled. “I’m still so upset about it. Why didn’t I call the police? I still get so angry and mad. I really blame myself every day.”
Zubair said he hopes Hassan will be forced to share a prison cell with the most hardened criminals “so they will teach him a lesson the same way he treated Aasiya.”