“When Aasiya Zubair Hassan was finally ready to leave her husband, she prepared herself. She gathered copies of her police reports, photos of her beaten face, images of her ransacked house, scripts her husband made her memorize.
Then she painstakingly chronicled her years of torment in a 21-page court statement that painted her husband as not just a batterer, but a cruel, manipulative monster.
She detailed how he deprived her of sleep to “improve her personality,” made her sign memos authorizing him to punish her if she talked with the police and Child Protective Services, and threatened her with the loss of her children whenever she tried to break free.
Toward the end of her statement appealing for divorce in February 2009, she reflected on how furious her husband would be when he saw the document: “I am afraid of what he might do.”
One week later, she was dead. Her husband, Muzzammil “Mo” Hassan, led police to her stabbed and decapitated body in the Bridges TV studio they founded in Orchard Park.
None of this has apparently stopped Hassan from continuing — in letters to reporters and in his defense in court — to try to paint himself as the victim and his wife as the abuser.
“He was the abuser. He was the perpetrator. Now, he’s the manipulator,” said Afshan Qureshi, an advocate of domestic violence victims who knew both Aasiya Zubair Hassan, Hassan’s third wife, and Sadia Hassan, his second wife. “Those who are good at emotional abuse are good manipulators.”
From the Erie County jail, Hassan has sent handwritten letters to The Buffalo News and others portraying himself as an abused and battered spouse. In each case, he signed his mother’s name to the documents.
“If you are a mother like me, would you like to see your son being abused and cannot even turn to the system for help?” stated one letter.
It is clear that he wrote the letters, not his mother. Hassan, 45, has neat and distinctive penmanship. The News found the handwriting in all these letters match that of other documents signed under his own name. The postmarks are from Buffalo; his mother lives in Texas.
Hassan seems to have no reservations about manipulating people by assuming other identities. In numerous cases, he appeared to have secretly authored documents that re-created reality and/or portrayed his wife as a dominating, mentally unstable woman.”
