CANADA • Geeti,13 -Sahari,17 -Zainab,19 SHAFIA ~ Kingston ON

Left to right: Mohammad Shafia, Hamed Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Mohammad Yahya face four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to commit murder.

The trio are charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of the couple's teenage daughters, Zainab, 19; Sahari, 17; and Geeti, 13; and of Shafia's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50.

Their bodies were found June 30 in a Nissan Sentra submerged next to the Kingston Mills Locks on the Rideau Canal. The grisly discovery was made by a lock master reporting for duty who noticed tire tracks down a grassy embankment and found the vehicle under water, with three bodies inside.

Kingston police Chief Stephen Tanner receives an email from someone claiming to be a relative of deceased Ms. Mohammad in which she suggests the deaths could have been for “honour.”


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Accused in Kingston canal deaths switches lawyers — again
January 21, 2011

KINGSTON, Ont. — Three Montreal residents accused of killing four family members won't go on trial in April as planned because of the surprise firing of one of three defence lawyers.

Hamed Shafia, 21, has dismissed Kingston, Ont., lawyer Clyde Smith and replaced him with Ottawa lawyer Patrick McCann. McCann was hired a week ago, roughly three months before the trial was scheduled to begin.

It is the second time Shafia has switched lawyers since he, his father, Mohammad Shafia, 57, and his mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, were arrested July 23, 2009, and each charged with four counts of first-degree murder. A week and a half after the arrests, the trio replaced their Montreal lawyers with three Kingston solicitors.

Three Shafia sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were found dead inside a car that was discovered submerged in a shallow canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009. Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, who was Mohammad Shafia's first wife, was also found dead inside the car

.....Maranger agreed to put off the start of the trial to October. The exact date won't be known until McCann completes other cases.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Accused+Kingston+canal+deaths+switches+lawyers+again/4147485/story.html#ixzz1BnCE6XzZ

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A timeline of the Kingston canal deaths

A St. Léonard couple allegedly began making plans to kill their three daughters, along with the husband’s first wife, weeks before the bodies of all four victims were found in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal.

Mohammad Shafia, 56, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 39, and their 18-year-old son Hamed Shafia, all face first-degree murder charges in the deaths which came to light after a black Nissan Sentra was discovered in the canal near the Kingston Mills Locks.

Below is a reconstructed timeline of events leading up to the arrests.

June 30 The Shafia family, from the St. Léonard district of Montreal, is returning home from a trip to Niagara Falls. They stop for the night in a Kingston, Ont., motel in the early hours. They are travelling in two vehicles.

June 30, 1:30 a.m. According to testimony given by the family after the deaths, 19-year-old Zainab Shafia asks her parents for the keys to the family’s Nissan Sentra. (The family later said Zainab often took the car without consent, but police have cast doubt on this testimony.)

June 30 At some point that day, police allege Hamid Mohammad Shafia, the girls’ brother, drives the family’s other car, a Lexus SUV, back to Montreal. (According to one published report, the father said that upon waking up and discovering the girls were gone, they drove on to Montreal planning to catch up to the Nissan.)

June 30, 9:30 a.m. A black 2004 Nissan Sentra is discovered underwater in front of the northernmost lock wall at the Kingston Mills locks. The Nissan is submerged in about three feet of water, its front end up against the lock wall as if the car had plunged in backward. The bodies of four women, Zainab Shafia, her sisters Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and their father’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, are discovered inside the vehicle.

June 30, 12:30 p.m. Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Mohammad Yhaya walk into Kingston police headquarters to report their daughters and the Nissan missing. Police say they are accompanied by their son, Hamid, who has returned from Montreal and acts as a translator for his father.

July 2 Autopsies are performed on the four women. The results have not been released.

July 3 Shafia and Yhaya cry openly as they speak with reporters inside their Laval home. Shafia says his eldest daughter, whom he described as rebellious, may have taken the car with her sisters and aunt, even though she did not have a driver’s licence. Police say they consider the deaths suspicious and are baffled by how the car got into the water. It had to cross a patch of grass, either over a concrete barrier or through a gate, and through two poles on the dock.

July 5 The Shafia family buries the dead at an Islamic cemetery in Laval.

Days later Kingston police Chief Stephen Tanner receives an email from someone claiming to be a relative of deceased Ms. Mohammad in which she suggests the deaths could have been for “honour.” Reports say Mohammad’s sister wrote to the Chief to say her sister and the eldest Shafia daughter had been receiving death threats “for social, cultural and family reasons.”

July 22 The parents and brother are arrested, reportedly while on their way to Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal. Police believe at least one of the three had plans to travel to a foreign country.

July 23 Police say they have charged Shafia, Yahya and their son Hamid Mohammad Shafia with four counts each of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Police said they have been able to “link” the Lexus SUV and the three accused to the locks. They believe that on the night in question, it was the three accused who “operated” the Nissan. Conspiracy charges filed at the Kingston courthouse Thursday reveal investigators believe plans to commit the murders were hatched as far back as May 1.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/timeline+Kingston+canal+deaths/1824608/story.html#ixzz1BnJOxVpz

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Three of the victims are shown in this undated family photo. Sisters Zainab Shafia,
Sahar Shafia and Geeti Shafia from St. Léonard, along with Rona Amir Mohammed,
Muhammad Shafia's first wife.

* Complete coverage of the Kingston tragedy.....
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/kingston-tragedy/more.html

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Commentary
Barbara Kay: Communities must speak out against brutal traditions
January 26, 2011

Canadians are not racist, but they are increasingly skeptical about the ideal of multiculturalism. Mass immigration, many feel, will only be desirable when immigrants choose to Canadianize, as they did in the years before multiculturalism was ensconced as an official state doctrine in the 1970s.

Here is one reason why they are skeptical. In a few months, Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed will submit to Canadian justice in a courtroom. Each of them faces four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of three teenage daughters/sisters, as well as the death of Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad. Details may emerge about the motivation for these alleged crimes, similar to many we’ve seen before, that will sicken and enrage most Canadians.

In the honour killings recorded in Canada since 2002 — 12 have been reported in total, but there probably are many more — the victims were girls or women, the perpetrators fathers and brothers, abetted by other family members. (Occasionally, absent a male authority figure in the household, mothers have killed their daughters.)

Honour codes, in which a girl or woman’s perceived sexual virtue is the linchpin around which an entire family’s good opinion of itself and its standing in the community revolves, are an importation to this country from regions, mainly the Middle East and South Asia, where honour culture has been entrenched for centuries. Although actual killings of girls and women, and abuses such as female genital mutilation (FGM) are typically associated with Muslim cultures, forced marriages, forced suicides and dowry fraud are present in Hindu, Sikh and (as we shall see below) even Christian communities from South Asia.

All such practices are anathema to Western culture, and in particular to our values of individualism and gender equality.

READ MORE

Women were killed to preserve family honour, court hears
October 20, 2011


Hamed Shafia, left, his father Mohammad Shafia, and his mother Tooba Mahommad Yahya, right, arrive in Frontenac County Court in Kingston, Ont. on Thurs., Oct. 20 , 2011 for the start of their first-degree murder trial. (MICHAEL LEA/QMI AGENCY)

Four Montreal women were killed and dumped into the Rideau Canal to preserve the honour of their family, a jury was told on the opening day of a first-degree murder trial here.

A courtroom packed with spectators listened to a tale of physical and mental abuse suffered by the four victims, aged 13 to 50, which lead to the discovery of their bodies on June 30, 2009.

Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle presented an overview from evidence gathered from Kingston police wiretaps, cellphone records, one of the victim’s diaries and interviews with police and child protection workers in Montreal.

Standing trial on four counts of first-degree murder are Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their son, Hamed.

The Shafias are accused of murdering three of their daughters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 53, Mohammad Shafia’s first wife.

At one point, said Lacelle, Mohammad Shafia is heard saying in a surveillance recording that they “betrayed us immensely.”


“Even if they hoist me up to the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honour. There is nothing more valuable than our honour,” Lacelle quoted from a wiretap transcript.

In another recording Shafia says, “May the devil s--- on their graves.”

Lacelle also referred to interviews with the accused giving

conflicting accounts of what transpired the night of June 30 when the car with the four victims went into the water at Kingston Mills.

During the course of the trial, expected to take eight to 10 weeks to complete, the Crown will call an expert witness on the subject of honour killings.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2011/10/20/18854431.html

Bits of smashed headlight key to ‘honour killings’ of four, murder trial told
October 20, 2011



Plastic shards from a smashed headlight discovered near a Kingston lock where four bodies were found in a submerged Nissan Sentra matched pieces later taken from a Montreal home, a murder trial has heard. And still another fragment was located at a parking barrier in the same city.

Put together – literally – by Kingston police, the court exhibits were placed before a jury on Thursday and go to the heart of the prosecution’s case against two men and a woman accused of committing four “honour killings” allegedly rooted in a perverse interpretation of Afghan tradition.


The four victims were three teenaged sisters and the first wife of the wealthy businessman charged with orchestrating the deaths with his son and second wife and disposing of the bodies by faking an accident at the Kingston Mills lock in June, 2009.

Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife, 41-year-old Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their son, Hamed, 21, are accused of killing the couple’s three teenaged daughters, Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, and Mr. Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 53,

It was all planned well ahead of time, Crown prosecutor Laurie Lacelle told the jury of seven women and five men in her opening remarks, outlining a wealth of incriminating acts before and after the deaths.

They included: A Google inquiry on Mr. Shafia’s home computer about “where to commit a murder.”

A wiretapped conversation in which he said of the four victims: “God’s curse on them for generations,” and “There is nothing more important than our honour.”

The family was travelling in the Nissan and a Lexus back to their Montreal-area home after a short vacation in Niagara Falls and stopped overnight in Kingston. Mr. Shafia and Ms. Yahya went to the Kingston police the next day to report four missing.

Mr. Shafia said their rebellious elder daughter, Zainab, 19, took the Nissan without permission.

By then, the submerged car had been found in the Rideau Canal just east of Kingston, and when told of this, Mr. Shafia and his wife voiced shock at what seemed like a dreadful accident.

But it was no accident, Ms. Lacelle told the jury.

The Nissan was propelled into the lock with the Lexus, she said, and the splinters of smashed headlight were key to what happened.

Hamed Shafia told police the light was broken when he struck a parking barrier in Montreal, and a piece was found where he said the accident occurred. Other bits were in the Lexus, parked in the family garage.

But the seven fragments found near the lock told a different story, the prosecutor contended, adding that the parking-barrier incident was a ruse.

Autopsies showed that all four victims drowned, Ms. Lacelle said, but it was not clear where and how.

The three teenagers all had fresh bruises on their heads, she said.

The prosecutor painted a picture of an abusive, severely dysfunctional family in which the daughters were treated like chattels.

Mr. Shafia and his son, she said, were particularly upset about the girls’ Western lifestyle, most of all their interest in dating young men.

Seated in the prisoner’s box, the two men were impassive, but Ms. Yahya sometimes wept.

She and her husband listened on headphones to a simultaneous translation of the proceedings in their native language, a Dari dialect of Farsi.

All three defendants have pleaded not guilty.

The Shafia family lived in a polygamous arrangement and moved to Canada in 2007, settling in the Montreal borough of St. Leonard after living in Australia, Pakistan and then in Dubai for 15 years.

The Shafias had seven children, three of whom were placed in care by Quebec authorities after their parents’ arrest.

All seven are the offspring of Mr. Shafia and Ms. Yahya, whom he married in Afghanistan in 1988.

A wealthy businessman who had prospered in Montreal until his arrest, the Kabul-born Mr. Shafia came to Canada under Quebec’s immigrant investor program.

The trial before Mr. Justice Robert Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court is expected to hear from almost 60 witnesses and last two to three months.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/prosecution-paints-picture-of-clumsy-cover-up-in-honour-killings-trial/article2207448/

Shafia Trial: Secret tapes revealed at Shafia trial


Mohammad Shafia, son Hamed and wife Tooba are ushered from the Kingston courthouse during a break Thursday at the first day of their trial for killing sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, whose bodies were found in a submerged car.
Photograph by: Lars Hagberg, Special to the Gazette

In the days after Mohammad Shafia’s three daughters died, he spoke privately to family members about how they had dishonoured him by consorting with boys, jurors at his murder trial were told Thursday.

“God’s curse on them … May the devil shit on their graves,” Shafia said, in a conversation with his second wife, Tooba, and son, Hamed, that was secretly recorded by police.

“Is that what a daughter should be? Would (a daughter) be such a whore?”

Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle revealed the excerpt from a wiretap during a 1½-hour opening address to the six-man, six-woman jury.

The cavernous room of Kingston’s 153-year-old limestone courthouse was filled with dozens of journalists and roughly 100 spectators as the high-profile mass killing case began to unspool in public.

Shafia, 58, and his second wife Tooba, 41, along with their son Hamed, 20, are accused of killing their daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, who was Shafia’s first wife.

The four members of the Montreal family originally from Afghanistan were found dead in a car discovered submerged in a shallow canal on June 30, 2009.

Jurors were told that they will hear evidence about the ancient cultural practice of honour killing, in which the chastity and obedience of female family members is paramount.

In some cases, families believe the only way to cleanse shame and restore honour is to kill offending women.

Lacelle told the jurors that police planted a listening device in a Shafia vehicle on July 18 and recorded several conversations in which Shafia complained to his wife and son that his daughters had turned bad.

They wore revealing clothes and makeup. Zainab ran away from home in May of 2009 and demanded permission to marry her Pakistani boyfriend.

The two other daughters wanted to leave home to get way from an oppressive and abusive environment.

“It was all treason, they committed treason from beginning to the end,” Lacelle said, quoting Shafia from another wiretap.

“They betrayed humankind; they betrayed Islam; they betrayed our religion and creed; they betrayed our tradition; they betrayed everything.”

Lacelle revealed police seized a laptop computer from the family’s home in St. Léonard.

It was registered to Shafia but used by Hamed. Forensic experts found evidence of a Google search 10 days before the deaths.

“The words entered were: ‘Where to commit a murder’,” Lacelle said. A few weeks earlier there had been a search on the computer for, “Can a prisoner have control over their real estate,” the prosecutor said.

Lacelle said autopsies on the victims showed they drowned, though experts could not determine when.

Toxicology tests did not find any evidence of any incapacitating substances in the bodies of the victims. Three of the victims had fresh bruises on the crowns of their heads. Lacelle offered no explanation for the injuries.

Only one witness appeared Thursday, Kingston police Constable Julia Moore, an identification officer who collected evidence and took photos. Moore explained that the car in which the victims were found, a Nissan Sentra, was in first gear, with the driver’s side window down, the headlights switched off. The two front seats were reclined.

Lacelle said the jurors will hear evidence that Tooba and Hamed have both acknowledged in statements that they were at the locks when the Sentra went into the water.

In public statements the family made in the days after the deaths, they said Zainab had taken the car without permission on that night and they did not know how the four ended up dead in the canal.

The family had stopped in Kingston early on the morning of June 30 on the way home to Montreal from a family trip to Niagara Falls. They took two rooms at a motel near the locks.

Defence lawyers did not make any opening statements to the jury and they have not yet cross-examined Moore. She will be back on the stand Friday.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+Trial+Secret+tapes+revealed+Shafia+trial/5583891/story.html

FULL COMMENT Christie Blatchford:
‘I would do it again’; court hears horror of alleged honour killing


Sahar Shafia, 15, who was found dead with 3 others, Zainab Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 53, Their bodies were found on the morning of June 30, 2009, in a Nissan Sentra submerged in the Kingston Mills locks, on the edge of the town of Kingston.
Court Exhibit

It’s the Canadian Maple Leaf that flies high over the picturesque locks at Kingston Mills near this historic city, but on the night of June 30, 2009, it might just as well have been the black-red-and-green flag of Afghanistan, with its sacred line proclaiming the greatness of Allah.

What happened at the locks that night, Crown prosecutors alleged in Ontario Superior Court Thursday, was a so-called “honour killing,” the culmination of a violent misogynist Afghan culture that had been transplanted holus-bolus years earlier into the heart of central Canada.

“May the devil s— on their graves,” Mohammad Shafia told his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 20 days after the bodies of the couple’s three teenage daughters and Mr. Shafia’s first wife were recovered from a car in the water at the locks.


Geeti Shafia, 13 .. . . . . . . . . . . . . Court Exhibit

Found dead by drowning in a black Nissan Mr. Shafia had bought just eight days earlier – the suggestion implicit that he got it for that very purpose — were Rona Amir Mohammad, the barren wife who had been presented to the children and outsiders both as an “auntie,” and rebellious daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and 13-year-old Geeti.

Charged with four counts each of first-degree murder are Mr. Shafia, Ms. Yahya and their oldest son Hamed, who was 18 at the time. All are pleading not guilty.

The ghastly conversation was captured on a Kingston Police wiretap, prosecutor Laurie Lacelle told Judge Robert Maranger and a jury.

In another snippet recorded by the device police had placed in a family car, Mr. Shafia told Ms. Yahya, “They committed treason themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion…they betrayed everything.”

He said whenever he saw the pictures taken by Zainab and Sahar on their cell phones – these were goofy shots of them posing in bras and panties, or with their forbidden boyfriends — “I am consoled.

“I say to myself, ‘You did well.’ Were they to come to life, I would do it again.”

In a detailed opening address of 90 minutes, Ms. Lacelle told the jurors they would hear from a variety of witnesses, including those to whom Rona Mohammad and the children had confided their fear of Mr. Shafia and Hamed.

In fact, what was most galling about the prosecutor’s overview of the evidence to come was how very openly the teenagers had rebelled against their parents — once, from a street corner in Montreal where the family lived, they begged a stranger to call 911 for them because they were so afraid to go home — and how little Canadian authorities and Canadian law helped them.

In fact, Quebec child protection authorities twice investigated complaints from Sahar’s school, once little more than three weeks before the four bodies were found.

In the first instance, Ms. Lacelle said, the social worker deemed the complaint to be “founded” – true, in other words – but closed the file anyway when Sahar wouldn’t talk to her once she learned that the worker would be obligated to tell her parents what she’d told her.

The next time she interviewed the girl two days later, “Sahar was wearing the hijab” and claimed things had improved at home.

In the second instance, though police in Montreal interviewed the children separately and had them open up about their maltreatment – including the fact that Mr. Shafia allegedly “often threatened to kill them” – the child protection worker interviewed the girls in the presence of their parents.


Zainab Shafia, 17 . . . . . . . . . . Court Exhibit

Unsurprisingly, they clammed up or recanted their earlier allegations, and the worker closed the file.

Though the family – Mr. Shafia, two wives and a total of seven children – left Afghanistan in 1992, they didn’t emigrate to Canada until June of 2007, with Rona Mohammad following six months later on a visitor’s visa.

She left a diary, found by police, which detailed the alleged beatings she suffered at her husband’s hands and the cruelty dished out to her by her fertile replacement, Ms. Yahya, who allegedly told her, “Your life is in my hands” and, “You are not his wife; you are my servant.”

Though Mr. Shafia and Hamed may have appeared the picture of successful and Westernized men – the father was wealthy, owned a shopping mall in Laval and had contracted to build an upscale home, and the family had lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai – behind closed doors, they might as well have been back in Afghanistan.

The oldest son Hamed was the head of the household when Mr. Shafia was away. He had a driver’s licence and his own cell phone, used his father’s silver Lexus, and helped him in business.

The daughters, meanwhile, had phones registered to either father or son, and Zainab was kept out of school for a full year after the family discovered she had a boyfriend.

It was her running away, in the spring of 2009, to a women’s shelter which sparked the family’s downward spiral, Ms. Lacelle told the jurors.

But Sahar, too, was rebelling. She had a boyfriend. She loved makeup and clothes, like her big sister. She wanted to be a gynecologist, and was moved by the plight of her native sisters in Afghanistan.

Once, miserable at facing the prospect of having to wear a hijab, she tried to kill herself. According to Rona Mohammad’s diary, Ms. Yahya snapped, “She can go to hell; let her kill herself.”

But it was the little girl, Geeti, who fought her parents most ferociously and who begged most blatantly for help.


Rona Amir Mohammad, Mohammad Shafia's first wife . . . . . Court Exhibit

“She told her school,” Ms. Lacelle said. “She told the police. She told youth protection.”

What she told them was that she wanted to be out of her family home, to be placed with a foster family.

The teen was failing at school, late coming home, was caught shoplifting and was even sent from school for wearing revealing clothing.

Just weeks before she died, the school vice-principal phoned and told Ms. Yahya why she was being sent home.

It was Ms. Yahya who convinced Zainab to leave the shelter, who promised she could marry her boyfriend.

On May 18, she did get married, a ceremony witnessed, of course, only by the male members of the family.

At a later family dinner, her husband’s family refused to attend, and the marriage was annulled the same day. Plans were put in place for her to marry a cousin.

By the first of June that year, Hamed was in Dubai, and there, on his father’s laptop, began conducting Google searches. The key words the first time were, “Can a prisoner have control over their real estate?” Another, on June 20, had the following key words: “Where to commit a murder?”

Prosecutors allege that after a brief family vacation in Niagara Falls, the plan was put into action. An OPP expert witness will testify that in his opinion, the Nissan got “hung up” on the locks and Mr. Shafia’s silver Lexus “was used to push the Nissan” into the water.

Autopsies later revealed that only Sahar didn’t have, on the crown of her head, fresh bruising, which had occurred when the women were alive.

Rona Mohammad once told a friend overseas, who will testify here, that she was afraid to leave – afraid Mr. Shafia would kill her, and hurt the children.

The friend told her, Ms. Lacelle said, “She was not in Afghanistan. She was in Canada, and not to be afraid.”

How wrong that woman was.



Left to right: Hamed and Mhammad Shafia, and Tooba Mohammad Yahya are charged with first degree murder.


http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/10/20/christie-blatchford-%E2%80%98i-would-do-it-again%E2%80%99-court-hears-horror-of-an-alleged-honour-killing/

Bodies of three sisters and dad's 1st wife found suspended inside submerged car
October 21, 2011

A car found at the bottom of an eastern Ontario canal with the bodies of three sisters and their father's first wife suspended in the water inside seemed to trace a very deliberate path, a murder trial heard Friday.

In a case that has raised the issue of so-called honour killings, the Crown alleges the girls' family couldn't bear the "treachery" of their daughters having boyfriends, so they killed them and staged the scene to look like an accident.

But it certainly didn't look like an accident to the first officer on the scene at the Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009, court heard Friday. Kingston police Const. Brent White testified that he first thought the car at the bottom of the locks was the work of pranksters with a stolen vehicle.

The Crown theory of the car's path, which White suspected that day, is that it would have had to travel past a locked gate, over a concrete curb and a rocky outcrop and then make two U-turns to end up in the locks of the canal.

"In my mind...I'm thinking this is pretty difficult to get that vehicle in that narrow spot," White testified. "It had to be driven there on purpose."

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, Shafia's first wife, who lived with the family in a polygamous relationship.

When the three defence lawyers cross-examined White and another police witness Friday, they suggested there were many other points where a car could have gone into the water much easier and much more directly. Hamed Shafia's lawyer, Patrick McCann, likened the car going in the "circuitous" path the Crown suggests as akin to "threading the needle."


A aerial photo showing a crime scene was shown to a jury in Kingston on Thursday Oct. 20, 2011.

Kingston police Const. Julia Moore testified Friday that when the bodies were discovered they were floating in the car. A police diver took a video camera down into the locks and police at the surface could see Sahar and Rona in the backseat, in seated positions.

Rona Amir Mohammad was Shafia's first wife, but he married Yahya when it became apparent Mohammad couldn't have children. She lived with the family in a polygamous marriage and helped raise the children, court heard.

Zainab likely started out in the front passenger seat, court heard, but was found floating, with her back against the ceiling, facing the rear.

Geeti, the youngest, was found suspended over the driver's seat, one arm wrapped around the headrest and her head against the door post.

Yahya, the girls' mother, appeared to cry, burying her face in a tissue as Moore described the positioning of the bodies. The two accused men were stoic.

The Montreal family had been on their way home from a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont. Court has heard that a motel manager will testify that when Shafia and Hamed checked in to two rooms for the family that night, at first Shafia said there would be six guests. There were 10 people on the family trip.

Read more

Mom accused in honour killing won't have to watch video of submerged death car
October 24, 2011


Mohammad Shafia (left), his son Hamed (back right) and Tooba Mohammad Yahya (front right) walk into the Frontenac Court courthouse in Kingston, Ont. on October 20, 2011. Mohammad Shafia and his wife Tooba - along with their son Hamed - are charged with first degree murder in the deaths of their daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as that of Rona Amir Mohammad, 50. The bodies were found in Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009.
Photograph by: Lars Hagberg, Montreal Gazette

The woman accused of taking part in an honour killing of her three teenage daughters and her rival co-wife won't have to be in court when prosecutors play a police video that shows the quartet's watery grave in the Rideau Canal.

As the short clip was about to be played in Ontario Superior Court here Monday, David Crowe, lawyer for Tooba Mohammad Yahya, rose to tell Judge Robert Maranger and a jury that the video "may raise some issues of emotional trauma for my client."

Yahya, 41, also got to her feet in apparent protest in the prisoner's box she shares with husband Mohammad Shafia and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia.

"You're asking that your client be excused during the playing of the video?" the judge asked.

Crowe said he was, especially if the video "shows her children's bodies."

Crown prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis told the judge the video wasn't especially graphic — indeed, the jurors had already heard it is of uncertain quality — but agreed that an accused person could absent herself for part of her trial. Judge Maranger concurred.

The video will be played Tuesday, the judge said, and arrangements will be made for Yahya's absence.

The unusual move appears to blur the line between alleged perpetrator and victim.

It may also mark the start of a defence strategy to separate Yahya from her two co-accusers and distinguish her from them in jurors' eyes.

She is jointly on trial with her 58-year-old husband and 21-year-old son for four counts of first-degree murder in the drowning deaths of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti — respectively 19, 17 and 13 — and 53-year-old Rona Mohammad Amir.

All are pleading not guilty.

The four bodies were discovered in a black Nissan at the bottom of the Kingston Mills locks, part of the Rideau Canal waterway not far from this historic city, on June 30, 2009.

Prosecutors allege they were murdered in "a planned and pre-meditated" killing meant to restore the family honour, purportedly damaged by the three rebellious teens, the older two of whom had boyfriends. An expert witness will testify later that such killings in some cultures — the family members are Afghans who came to Canada in 2007 — revolve around "the notion of the control of women's bodies, especially women's sexuality . . . "

As for Amir's death, prosecutor Laurie Lacelle suggested in her opening statement last week that Yahya was the one with the driving motive.

The two wives quarrelled frequently, with Yahya, as the fertile one who gave birth to the couple's seven children, enjoying an elevated status within the marriage.

In that lengthy opening, Lacelle said Yahya had given two different versions of what happened the night of the deaths.

In the first version, when as the prosecutor said police were treating the family as "victims of a tragic accident in which their family members were killed," all three blamed the "accident" on Zainab.

Each said that at their Kingston-area motel where they stopped for the night, the eldest daughter had taken the car keys, and that was the last they saw of her. Only when they woke up on June 30 did they discover the others were also missing, they said.

But on the day of the trio's arrest a month later, Yahya told police that she had been driving the Nissan that night, was tired and ill, and that the family stopped at a place they'd stopped at once before (this was the Kingston Mills lock).

While the women waited in the darkness, father and son, she told police, went off to find a motel.

When they returned, Yahya said she jumped in the car and didn't know what happened after that.

But later in her interview, she admitted that she, Shafia and Hamed were all there when the Nissan went into the water. They heard a splash, ran over and saw the car in the water, she said, and then she fainted and lost consciousness, waking only when she was back at the motel.

When pressed by police about who had tried to rescue the girls or called 911, she replied, "The police? I don't remember the rest."

Yahya also told the police she knew that her husband had spoken about killing Zainab. Another witness will testify about a conversation in which Shafia discussed killing Zainab, and Yahya reportedly asked, "What about that other person?"

The Nissan was found in an unusual location at the picturesque locks, wedged into a small and relatively inaccessible space, in shallow water, between the lock wall and a push bar used to lift the gate.

The prosecution theory is that it was pushed into the water by the family's Lexus: that car was damaged in the front end, while the Nissan was damaged in the rear.

According to Lacelle, in the days before, Hamed had done a number of Google searches, including one with the key words "Where to commit a murder," and had researched various bodies of water.

The underwater video was shot by Ontario Provincial Police Constable Glenn Newell, a member of the force's dive team. He said he was bewildered both by the position of the car and by the fact that none of the four people inside it appeared to have tried to escape via the open driver's side window.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/accused+honour+killing+have+watch+video+submerged+death/5599556/story.html

Police diver tells Shafia murder trial he was ‘perplexed’ by sunken car

October 25, 2011



The veteran police diver who recovered the bodies of three teenage sisters and their stepmother from a sunken car was “perplexed” that he could not determine who was driving the vehicle when it plunged into a shallow canal.

“They were all piled on top of each other almost; it was very strange,” Constable Glenn Newell testified Monday at the murder trial of three Montrealers accused of slaying four family members in an alleged honour killing.

“I really couldn’t determine which person would have been the driver.”

Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed, 20, have pleaded not guilty. They claimed publicly that the victims died in a joyride that ended in tragedy.

Newell, a 24-year member of the Ontario Provincial Police underwater search and recovery unit, estimated he has pulled more than 250 drowning victims out of lakes and rivers, including 100 bodies pried from submerged vehicles.

Newell said that in most cases he’s able to tell who was driving in a crash in which car occupants drown. When he swam roughly eight feet down to the submerged Nissan Sentra on June 30, 2009, he found a puzzling and grim scene.

“It didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me, how that would happen,” he said. “I was quite perplexed by it. … I was kind of confused as to how the vehicle ended up the way that it did and with the people in the positions that they were in.”

The vehicle was in shallow water, its rear end elevated about two feet off the bottom and wedged at one corner against the thick wood door of a lock at Kingston Mills.

Sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, were found dead inside the car. Autopsies showed they drowned. Prosecutors allege the car was pushed into the canal as a staged accident to conceal the killings.

“It would be highly unusual to not be able to determine that there was a person in the driver’s seat,” Newell testified.

The accused mother clutched a tissue tightly to her face and appeared to be sobbing quietly as Newell described what he found.

Newell said the driver’s side window was down fully, yet it did not appear anyone had tried to escape through the sizable opening. He said that at recovery scenes he sometimes finds the body of a driver partly out through an open window, his or her feet stuck in the steering wheel or their body entangled in the seatbelt. None of the victims were wearing seatbelts when Newell found them, and there were only a few objects inside.

“I would think it would have made it very simple for anybody who could get to that window to get out that window,” Newell testified.

READ MORE

Video of 4 bodies in submerged car played at trial
October 25, 2011


A car found at the bottom of an eastern Ontario canal with the bodies of three sisters and their father's first wife suspended in the water inside seemed to trace a very deliberate path, a murder trial heard Friday, Oct. 21, 2011. (Shafia Trial Evidence Photo / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Ontario jurors saw for themselves today how the bodies of three teenage sisters and another family member looked suspended in water in a car at the bottom of a canal.

But the girls' mother, one of the people accused of killing them, asked to leave the courtroom so she didn't have to see the eerie video shot by a police diver.

Sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and 13-year-old Geeti Shafia, were discovered with their polygamist father's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, in a car on June 30, 2009 in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont.

The girls' mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, their father, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their older brother, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.

The Crown alleges the Montreal family thought their daughters betrayed them by having boyfriends, so they killed them and staged the scene to look like an accident.

The 14-minute underwater video shot by provincial police Const. Glenn Newell was uneventful for the first 10 minutes, but when he pans up past the door panel, a pair of legs can be seen in the first in a series of grisly discoveries.

The jury could then see the head of one of the victims, facing down and with hair obscuring her face. Blankets, a purse, yellow bag, a torso and a hand of a victim are seen in the passenger side window on the driver's side.

No one is sitting in the driver's seat.

In the backseat are Rona Amir Mohammad and Sahar, who court has heard was "given" to Mohammad by Yahya to raise as her own, because Mohammad couldn't have children. The two were especially close, court has heard. Their bodies were found sitting side by side, their heads touching.

Newell testified on Monday that although one car window was open, it appeared that none of the victims had tried to get out of the vehicle.

"I would think it would make it very simple for somebody, who could get to that window, to get out of that window," he said.

The cause of death for all four victims was drowning, but it isn't possible to say for certain that they drowned in the canal where they were found, the Crown has said. Three of them had bruising on the crowns of their heads.

The Crown theory of the car's path is that it would have had to travel past a locked gate, over a concrete curb and a rocky outcrop and then make two U-turns to end up in the locks of the canal.

READ MORE

For the first nine minutes, it is an eerie underwater chronicle of a car in an alien environment.

Then, through the murky water, something human comes into view.

“That would be the inside of the car, steering wheel and legs from one of the victims, through the front windshield,” Constable Glenn Newell said, as he narrated the video he shot of a submerged car that contained the bodies of three teenage Montreal sisters and their stepmother, alleged victims of an honour killing staged to look like a car crash.

Newell’s video, shown Tuesday morning, was the jury’s first look at the victims as they were found more than two years ago in a shallow canal.

The veteran police diver recovered the bodies of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, from the car on June 30, 2009. Three weeks later, the girls’ parents, Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed 20, were arrested and each charged with four counts of first-degree murder.

They have pleaded not guilty.

The dead girls’ mother was not in court as the video played. Her lawyer said it would be traumatic for her to see the bodies of her dead children. She returned to the courtroom as soon as the video concluded.

Most of the 14-minute video shows technical aspects of the discovery, the position of the car underwater and various dents and scrapes. But there are grim moments, too.

The camera shows a thick matte of hair, the head of a victim wedged against the door pillar at the side of the car. As the camera moves along the driver’s side of the car and peers in through the open driver’s side window, stark white feet are visible. Later, the camera pans along the outside of the vehicle beside the rear passenger window, which is obscured by a blanket, a purse and a yellow plastic bag. As the camera moves around, a partially clenched hand, poking through the debris, comes into focus.

Hamed and Mohammad Shafia showed no emotion as the video played and appeared to be staring straight ahead.

The victims were found June 30, 2009, in a Nissan Sentra submerged in a shallow canal in Kingston. Autopsies revealed that three of them had fresh bruises on the crowns of their heads. Newell testified Monday that he was surprised that no one escaped the sinking car through the open driver’s window. Autopsies did not determine when the victims drowned.

In response to questions from Peter Kemp, the defence lawyer representing Shafia, Newell said the four women could have banged their heads on the passenger compartment ceiling as they were drowning.

“That would be totally feasible,” Newell said.

Jurors also heard that Mohammad Shafia and Hamed appeared at 2 a.m. on June 30 at the front desk of a small Kingston motel near the canal asking to rent two rooms.

When clerk Robert Miller asked how many people were checking in, he was told nine people, then six. He said he saw only the two men and one vehicle, a large grey SUV.

After checking the men in, Miller watched the vehicle leave and head north toward Highway 401.

“It struck me as odd,” he testified. Miller stayed up to watch to see if the vehicle returned, but when it was not back within half an hour, he went to bed.

A Montreal police officer testified that she was called to a strip mall parking lot a few blocks from the Shafia home in St. Léonard just before 8 a.m. that morning when Hamed Shafia called 911 to report a collision in the family’s Lexus with a guardrail.

Constable Nathalie Ledoux said she couldn’t understand why the driver had steered so close to the barrier in the large parking lot. He asked her if he could have the damage repaired right away, Ledoux testified.

A Kingston police identification officer also testified that three days after the Sentra was found in the canal, he realized that pieces of broken headlight lens that appeared to come from the Lexus, and were collected in Montreal and at the canal, appeared to align.

Constable Rob Etherington said he believed his discovery was fairly important.

“Something was going on that we didn’t know about yet,” he testified.

The accused mother and father have said publicly that they believe their eldest daughter took the family’s Sentra for a joyride after they checked into the Kingston motel and then crashed the car into the canal.

Prosecutors allege that the Lexus was used to push the Sentra into the canal and that Hamed then staged a phony crash in Montreal to conceal the damage to the Lexus. The SUV was found in the garage of the Shafia home on July 1.

Motel staff also testified Tuesday that around noon on June 30, they saw a member of the Shafia family arrive at the motel in a greenish mini van.

A collision reconstruction expert who examined the scene at the canal and the Shafia vehicles is scheduled to testify Wednesday.


http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Court+shown+video+bodies+submerged/5604306/story.html

Shafia Trial: Victims' car pushed into canal, trial told
October 26, 2011



Mohammad Shafia’s SUV pushed another car he owned into a shallow canal at an isolated, unlit location more than two years ago, a collision-reconstruction expert told a murder trial Wednesday.

Three of the Montreal businessman’s daughters and his first wife were found dead inside the submerged car. Shafia, 58, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed, 20, are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder. They pleaded not guilty.

Constable Chris Prent testified that the silver Lexus SUV rammed the Nissan Sentra from behind as the compact car dangled over a stone precipice, early on the morning of June 30, 2009, at Kingston Mills, a tiny hamlet on the Rideau Canal.

“There was certain damage present on the Nissan and there was certain damage present on the Lexus SUV that coincide and it’s my opinion that the Lexus was used to push the Nissan over the edge of the canal into the water,” Prent testified.

The accused mother and father said publicly they believed their eldest daughter took the Sentra for a joyride, without their permission, and crashed it into the canal. The family, originally from Afghanistan, had stopped in Kingston for an overnight rest while driving home to Montreal from Niagara Falls.

The Sentra was found by Parks Canada staff submerged in about three metres of water, next to the large wood door of a lock. Inside were the bodies of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 52. Autopsies showed they drowned, though the time and place they drowned could not be pinpointed.

Prent said many bits of “unusual” evidence suggested the Sentra did not go into the water on its own. The vehicle’s ignition was off, the headlights were off, the transmission was in first gear and all of the four occupants were not wearing seatbelts when they were found.

Also, the two front bucket seats were reclined at angles of roughly 45 degrees, an “unnatural” position for a driver, he said.

Prent, who has analyzed more than 150 collisions, focused on the smashed front-left corner of the Lexus and the damaged left-rear corner of the Sentra. The Sentra’s tail light was broken and there was a distinct horizontal line on its bumper, Prent said.

Underneath the Sentra, at a point roughly beginning at the car’s centre of gravity, undercoating was peeled back. The Ontario Provincial Police officer also noted damage to the bottom of the driver’s door that appeared to coincide with damage to a wood stair near the edge where the car plunged into the water.

Prent said he believes the car was taken to the stone lip of the canal and became snagged on the step, with the front-left wheel hanging in air over the water.

“As the vehicle was hanging over the edge of the canal … and the Lexus SUV applied force to the left-rear corner, the vehicle started to rotate to free it from the step,” he said.

The Sentra would have tilted right and then slid over the stone edge, he said, creating a motion that would explain the way the undercoating was peeled back and also explaining why the vehicle ended up seemingly backwards in the water. Because there was no damage to nearby canal machinery, he concluded the vehicle went over very slowly.

Prent also studied evidence from a collision involving the Lexus that Hamed Shafia reported around 8 a.m. in Montreal on June 30. He called police to say he had struck a guardrail in a parking lot.

“This was an attempt to cover up or get rid of any evidence that may have been consistent with damage caused at Kingston Mills locks,” Prent testified. He concluded that the Lexus was deliberately driven into the guardrail twice. The next day, police found the Lexus in the garage of the Shafia home in St. Léonard.

Defence lawyers have not yet had the chance to question Prent.

Thursday morning, jurors will be taken by bus to Kingston Mills, so they can understand the geography of the area where the car was found. It is a rare practice used in criminal trials called “taking a view.”

“You’re going to be free to move around, look around, look at some of the things you’ve heard about in court,” Justice Robert Maranger told the jurors Wednesday.

The Parks Canada site features four locks that can lift boats 15 metres up from the level of Lake Ontario into the canal system. The sunken Sentra was found just north of the northernmost of the four locks.

The judge barred journalists from taking pictures of him, the lawyers, jurors or accused at the site. The accused mother said she would not take part in the trip. Mohammad and Hamed Shafia will be taken in an unmarked van and kept inside the vehicle but in a position so that they can see what is taking place.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+Trial+Victims+pushed+into+canal+trial+told/5610532/story.html#ixzz1bxJjPqgj

Shafia jurors taken to where bodies were found
October 27, 2011

The jurors took 45 minutes to walk around the grounds, peer over the edge of the locks where the car was recovered, and see the circuitous route the accused were alleged to have driven the Sentra to the water.

Since the trial started last Thursday, the jury has seen dozens of photos of the area submitted as evidence by the Crown.

Security was heavy yesterday at the lock station.

A police dog sniffed the bushes as an Ontario Provincial Police boat with two officers cruised offshore, battling the cold and high winds coming off Colonel By Lake.

At about 9:30 a.m. the jurors arrived in a small bus, followed by a second bus carrying the judge, Crown attorneys, defence lawyers and court staff.

The jurors were allowed to move freely around the area, some standing alone over a key area of interest.

After 45 minutes, the jurors, lawyers, court officials and presiding judge Justice Robert Maranger returned to their buses and driven back to the Frontenac County Court House, where proceedings resumed at 11 a.m.

Much of the recent testimony and evidence has focused on how the Sentra belonging to the Shafia family ended up in the water at the top of the locks.

The viewing of the lock station was timely. Back at the courthouse defence lawyers conducted a two-hour cross-examination of an OPP officer who is an expert in collision reconstruction.

Const. Chris Prent testified on Wednesday that, in his expert opinion, the Nissan in which the women were found was bumped into water by the Shafias’ second vehicle, a Lexus SUV.

Pieces of the headlight assembly on the Lexus were found in a grassy area at the locks, and Prent said scrapes on the front bumper of the Lexus and rear end of the Nissan matched perfectly.

He also believes the cars got to the edge of the lock by exiting Kingston Mills Road over a curb, driving around a large rock outcrop and then into a relatively tight space between the lock gate and a winching device.

Defence lawyers questioned Prent’s theories.

Patrick McCann, representing Hamed Shafia, said there was no doubt the two vehicles collided.

He suggested, however, that the collision could have occurred on Kingston Mills Road and that the Nissan could have entered the lock area beside a metal gate, going over the edge of the lock under its own power.

“You cannot rule out the possibility of the vehicle being inadvertently driven into the canal,” McCann said.

“There’s always the possibility,” Prent replied. “The thing is, there’s too many things that point to the contrary.”

“It’s a possibility that can’t be totally discounted,” McCann continued.

“Correct,” Prent said.

Peter Kemp, lawyer for Mohammad Shafia, was more blunt.

“I’m struggling with the proposition that this vehicle became hung up and some additional force was used to push it into the canal,” he said.

Kemp asked Prent to explain testimony he had given during the preliminary hearings, in which he indicated someone had driven the car to the edge of the lock, got out, put it into low gear and let it go.

Police photos taken after the incident showed the ignition keys were in the off position when the car was recovered.

“I don’t know how the ignition got into the off position,” Prent said.

“The engine can’t be running if the key was in the off position,” Kemp replied.

The day’s testimony finished with Const. Derek Frawley of the Kingston Police explaining how he retrieved data from Mohammad Shafia’s computer.

Frawley, trained as a forensic computer analyst, said he discovered a number of Google searches on the Toshiba laptop with titles such as “where to commit a murder” and “can a prisoner have control over his real estate.”

His testimony continues Friday.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2011/10/27/18887406.html

Murder trial jury visits Kingston canal
October 27, 2011


A member of the jury points toward the water at the Kingston Mills Locks in Kingston on Thursday,
near where the bodies of Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13 and Rona Amir Mohammad were found.

The defendants say it’s the site of a tragic accident, the prosecution, a crime scene marking the horrific murder of three daughters and a wife.

On Thursday, in a judicial rarity, the jury got to see it for themselves.

The seven women and five men of the jury in the trial of 58-year-old Mohammed Shafia, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their 20-year-old son Hamed, took a sombre field trip to the Kingston Mills Locks.

It was just the beginning of a day filled with dense expert testimony, including from a forensic computer analyst who pored over the Shafia’s laptop and found Google and other Internet searches such as, “Where to commit a murder,” “Can a prisoner have control over his real estate,” and “Facts documentaries on murders.”

But the morning was filled with assertions on how the black Nissan in which all four victims were found made it into the Rideau Canal, where they were found dead on June 30, 2009.

Jurors peered intently at all of the locks’ complexities. They pointed, talked among themselves. Only the father and son attended, but did not exit their grey van.

It’s a complex area to navigate by car. There is the rock outcropping and an S-shaped path to the edge of the canal’s northern gate. Then there is the slender gap between obstacles to actually make it into the water, as the Crown has suggested.

The jurors will have to eventually decide if the Afghan-born couple — who were most recently living in Montreal — and their son killed the three daughters, Zainab, 19; Sahar, 17 and Geeti, 13, along with Shafia’s first wife, who was unable to bear him children, 53-year-old Rona Amir Mohammad.

The Crown contends, from wiretaps, accident reconstruction and forensic evidence, that this was an “honour” crime, perpetrated because the girls were rebellious, fond of western culture, and even had boyfriends.

The Crown, along with OPP reconstructionist Chris Prent, believe the family’s Lexus SUV was used to push the Nissan, whose undercarriage had become wedged at the canal’s edge, into the water.

Witnesses have testified that headlight assembly fragments at the scene match those from the Lexus.

Immediately after the tragedy, the Shafias claimed it was a terrible accident with Zainab, who didn’t have a licence, at the wheel.

Defence lawyers on Thursday challenged Prent’s testimony by suggesting that his theory could not have been possible as the key in the Nissan’s ignition was in the off position.

Prent said he didn’t know when the key was placed in that position. Asked whether it changed his opinion, he replied, “No, it doesn’t.”

Jurors will also have to decide whether several Internet searches undertaken before the deaths are merely innocuous, or the work of planning a mass murder.

Computer forensic specialist Constable Derek Frawley, of the Kingston Police, examined the family’s Toshiba A-200 laptop and prepared an extensive report on what he found, including:

• On June 3, 2009, a Google search for, “Can a prisoner have control over his real estate?”

• Dozens of Google and Google Maps queries throughout June on bodies of water in Quebec and Ontario, with hundreds of photographs viewed.

• On June 15, a search centred on a map that pictured Middle Rd. and Highway 401, a spot very near the Kingston Mill Locks.

• On June 16, searches on boat rentals, and renting “metal boxes” or “huge boxes.”

• On June 15, with the unique identifier of “M. Shafia” attached to the search, the keywords were: “Facts documentaries on murders.”

• On June 20: “Where to commit a murder.”


http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1077005--murder-trial-jury-visits-kingston-canal?bn=1

VIDEO: Police interrogate Shafia family about canal deaths
November 01, 2011

Almost immediately after a police officer began interviewing three people accused of killing their family, he suspected they knew more than they were telling him, court heard Tuesday.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, her husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.

Three teenage Shafia sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Shafia's other wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were found dead inside a submerged car in June 2009 in the Rideau Canal.

The family had stopped in Kingston, Ont., on their way home from a trip to Niagara Falls and they told police Zainab took the car keys after they stopped at a motel around 1:30 a.m. that night and that was the last they saw her.

"You mean that someone pushed them in?"

Court was shown videos Tuesday of police interviews with the family the day the bodies were found, and the detective is seen suggesting, especially to Hamed, that he may have witnessed something and isn't being truthful.

Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster confronts Hamed with the information that someone on a boat near the locks the night before heard a loud splash and also saw another large vehicle drive away.

"You mean that someone pushed them in?" Hamed asks.

Dempster says that's not what he was implying, but now, at the murder trial, that's exactly what the Crown alleges. The family is alleged to have used their Lexus SUV to push their Nissan Sentra, with the four victims inside, into the canal in the middle of the night.

The Nissan's back end was damaged, as was the front end of the Lexus, court has heard. The Crown alleges Hamed staged a collision with a pole in Montreal with the Lexus to account for the damage.

No explanation

Hamed's account of that collision is one of the many parts in his story that Dempster zeros in on, suggesting there are inconsistencies.

Dempster says he can't understand why, after the family had been driving non-stop from Niagara Falls since 6 p.m., the girls and women would want to hop into a car at 2 a.m.

"It's weird," he says. "No one here can make any sense of it. There's no explanation for them to be over there."

Dempster interviewed Hamed for a second time that evening after finding out Hamed had neglected to tell him about the damage to the Lexus.

Hamed appears at turns anxious and at turns bored in the interview.

"You know what, I'm telling you, I'm already in a lot of mess," Hamed says after Dempster confronts him about the Lexus collision.

"I don't know what you're doing, if you want to blame it on me. I don't know where you're going with this," he says.

Dempster excuses himself and leaves the room.

While he is gone, Hamed is seen biting his nail, cracking his knuckles, reorganizing cards in his wallet, reading through Dempster's notes and flexing his biceps.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/01/mtl-shafiatrialcontinues.html

Canal victims' mother breaks down in interrogation
November 02, 2011

A Montreal woman accused of killing her three daughters and her husband's first wife told police in a videotaped interrogation that she was not aware the father of her children was going to kill their girls.

The police videotape was shown to a jury in Kingston, Ont., Wednesday, during the canal locks death trial where the woman, her husband and her son face multiple first-degree murder charges.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.

They are accused of killing the family's three teenaged girls and the father's first wife.

The three teenage Shafia sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Shafia's other wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were found dead inside a submerged car in June 2009 in the Rideau Canal.

The interrogation shows Yahya crying and appearing worn out, as a police officer asks her questions about the night in June 2009 when the four were found dead.


The family is alleged to have used their Lexus SUV to push this Nissan Sentra into the canal in the middle of the night. Trial evidence photo

'This is not an accident, madam'

For much of the interview, RCMP Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh, who was brought in to conduct the interview in Farsi, goes over Yahya's story with her piece by piece, pointing out evidence that contradicted her account and accusing her of lying to him.

"This is not an accident, madam," he says. "You know what has happened here ... I don't want the lies. I don't want the lie that Zainab came and took the key and after that I didn't see her.

"Someone became God that night and decided that these three girls and this lady should have been killed," Mehdizadeh says.

"When they did this, they didn't do their work right, I am telling you."

Eventually, Yahya starts changing her story, bit by bit, but begins by asking that Mehdizadeh not tell her husband.

Girls never at hotel

She admits she was with her son and husband at the canal that night, and that the four dead people never made it to the motel.

Yahya tries to pin it on her husband, saying she and Hamed were walking by the canal and they heard a splash, ran over and saw the car in the water. It was at that point that she fainted, she said.

Mehdizadeh questioned why if that is in fact what happened, no one called police.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/02/shafia-trial-in-kingston.html


Tooba Mohammad Yahya interrogation

Shafia interrogation 2:51 The jury in Kingston's Shafia murder trial was shown video of police interrogating 3 suspects now accused of killing their family members, CBC's Dan Halton reports

Hamed Shafia interrogation 0:32 In an excerpt of a tape presented in court, police question Hamed Shafia about the deaths of his sisters and his father's wife.

Family murder trial hears accused may have been headed to airport when arrested



Almost immediately after a police officer began interviewing the surviving Shafia family members that day, he suspected the father, mother and the girls' brother knew more than they were telling him, he told court.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, her husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.

Their trial heard Tuesday that police had been building their case against the family, right from the days after the deaths up to the day before the arrests, when police executed a search warrant of the family home. The warrant made clear to the family that police believed they had killed their four family members, Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster testified.

Police also installed listening devices in the home during the search warrant to record what Shafia, Yahya and their son said after the search was over, Dempster said. The wiretap has not yet been played for the jury. The plan was to allow for one day to gather that evidence, then arrest the three on July 22, 2009.

In the early morning hours of July 22, a surveillance team saw the three accused get into their minivan and leave the house, and thought they were heading to the airport, so they were arrested then, Dempster said.

Dempster is the officer who conducted the first interviews with the family on June 30, 2009. In videos of the interviews with Yahya and Hamed, played for the jury Tuesday, Dempster becomes suspicious, particularly with Hamed. The jury watched Dempster's interview with an emotionless Shafia on Friday.

READ MORE

BLATCHFORD: Mother in honour killing trial admits she saw car underwater, did nothing
November 02, 2011

On the lengthy video police interview now being played for Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and a jury, Tooba Mohammad Yahya pressed her face into the pictures of her children, wept, threw back her head and for a long while keened.

From the prisoner's box, with a full view of her own torment on the screen before her, Yahya also cried from time to time, and once bent over at the waist, her head to the floor, and disappeared from view altogether for about 15 minutes.

It was distressing, as it always is to hear a person howl in pain — but then, this is Yahya we are describing, and she is no stranger, shall we say, to the theatre arts.

Indeed, in the first two-thirds of the interview the jurors have seen on video Yahya also occasionally protested that she was tired, weak or sick and that her mind was not stable, flirted with her handsome male interrogator, albeit in a perfectly proper Muslim/Afghan way (it is not unlike Protestant flirting, except with more flowery language), argued with him, disagreed with him and pretty much stood her ground.

Only hours into the interview did she finally admit that on the night her three daughters and "that lady" — as she invariably and dismissively called Rona Amir Mohammad, ostensibly her husband's cousin, but in truth his first wife — drowned in a black Nissan, she and her precious son Hamed heard the splash of the car entering the water at the Kingston Mills locks and ran toward it, "and we saw that a car was in the water."

Last time she'd seen that car, minutes earlier by her own admission, it was jammed with three of her seven kids — Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, respectively 19, 17 and 13 — and Amir.

But did she or Hamed do anything? Did they try to save the girls? Leap into the dark water? Call police?

They did not, Yahya acknowledged — in her case, she said, because of course she swooned from the shock and "fell down" and "became unconscious," as she is wont to do, and as for her son, she suggested, perhaps didn't have his cellphone.

"When the noise of the water came," she told Farsi-speaking RCMP Inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh, who had been brought in by Kingston Police to interrogate her, "we ran. We ran and came. At that moment, I became so stressed, as I didn't understand . . . I fell down. I screamed and fell down."

It was July 22, 2009, about three weeks since the death car had been discovered at the bottom of the most southerly of the Rideau Canal locks.

Yahya, now 41, her husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and Hamed, now 20, had been arrested earlier that day in connection with the deaths of the four women. The remaining children had been placed with a relative.

The parents and son are charged with four counts of first-degree murder each, and all are pleading not guilty.

Until this admission that she, Hamed and Shafia were at the locks, Yahya had stuck stubbornly to her story, denying they were there that night, or that she had any knowledge of what could have happened to wipe out half her family.

For all Mehdizadeh's efforts — he both spoke softly to her and flat out called her a liar, invoked their common religion, praised her role as a mother, twice put a comforting hand on her shoulder — her admissions were few and far between.

She admitted the three were there that night. She admitted that yes, her husband had once confided he wanted to kill the oldest daughter, Zainab, and that her brother had mentioned something about Shafia "wanted to kill or wants to kill something like that."

But even then, she had an explanation.

In a bit of nonchalance reminiscent of Karla Homolka's most infamous remark — that her husband, the killer Paul Bernardo, wanted to have sex with her baby sister only "the once," and it was just the once and Tammy Homolka died during the drugging attack — Yahya elaborated.

"Believe me he (Shafia) had never mentioned about killing them, as, 'I want to kill the children.' Not all, just her, because. . . "

Mehdizadeh interrupted: "Which one? What is the name?"

"Zainab," Yahya replied.

You see, it was just the one daughter Shafia confided he'd like dead. No wonder Yahya didn't give it a second thought.

Despite these late-in-the-game admissions to Mehdizadeh, she was still adamantly insisting that she didn't help in any plan to off the girls, that she didn't know of any plan, that at most critical moments she was sick, or asleep, or unconscious.

Pushed, she seemed prepared to let the chips fall where they may, so long as they fell at Shafia's feet. Any mention of Hamed's alleged role, any suggestion that Hamed was less than noble, and Yahya leaped like a mother tiger protecting her cub.

Mehdizadeh was skeptical. He told her that all the Afghans he knew would sacrifice their lives to save a family member. Yahya agreed. Yet all three of them, by her own account, had at minimum seen the car in the water and not lifted a finger.

Neither of them mentioned the distinction: Hamed is a boy, the people in the Nissan were girls. It's enough to make anyone go unconscious.

cblatchford@postmedia.com

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/national/BLATCHFORD+Mother+honour+killing+trial+admits+underwater+nothing/5647648/story.html

Shafia jurors hear fake theory made suspects talk

snipped . . . . .

She says she had been sitting in the family’s black Nissan Sentra, waiting for Hamed and Mohammad to find a motel room for the family of 10.

They had been travelling back home to Montreal from a vacation in Niagara Falls in two vehicles.

“I was with the girls, sitting calmly,” she said to Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh, brought by Kingston Police to interview Yahya in her native tongue, Farsi.

When the men returned in their Lexus SUV, Yahya said she walked over to them and stood talking with Hamed in the dark.

“I heard a noise. Hamed and I heard it,” she recounts. “We both ran and we saw that a car was in the water. This car has fallen into the water.”

Under Mehdizadeh’s relentless questioning, Yahya re-told the story several times.

Later she said, "We ran and we saw that the car was in the water, after that I don’t remember. Believe in God that I didn’t understand anything. I grab my hair and fell down, fell down."

And then the video showed this exchange:

Yahya: When the sound of the water came.

Mehdizadeh: Then you saw this?

Yahya: Then this gone into the water...

Mehdizadeh: Uh, ummm.

Yahya: When I ran towards the water, I didn’t know what happened to me.

Mehdizadeh: Did Hamed go? Did he go to save them?

Yahya: Yes, Hamed and I ran screaming. Hamed ran, too.

Mehdizadeh: Hamed went into the water to save them?

Yahya: Into the water no. He couldn’t go into the water.

Mehdizadeh: Why?

Yahya: He couldn’t go … we ran and I fell down.”

Mehdizadeh asks Yahya why the family didn’t report the car going in the water to police until noon that day, as much as 10 hours later.

In that time, the officer pointed out to her, Hamed even goes home to Montreal and, while there, reports an accident with the Lexus before coming back to Kingston mid-morning.

He also questioned her about why their three daughters, as well as the fourth victim, Rona Amir Mohammad, would have sat complacently in the Nissan as it fell into the cold water of the canal — after Yahya had told him they were all awake just prior to the incident.

“I told you,” she replied. “That when I heard … the sound of the water, Hamed and I ran. We ran over there. I was still not thinking that the children would have been in there. Believe me, yet I was thinking. I thought that when Hamed and I went to the other side their father had taken them. I was thinking like this.”

Earlier in the interrogation, Yahya insisted a number of times the entire family of 10 had checked into two rooms at the Kingston East Motel, just a few kilometres from Kingston Mills.

She told Mehdizadeh the oldest daughter, Zainab, came to her motel room and asked for the keys to the Nissan.

Mehdizadeh wanted her to tell him how the Nissan got from the road at Kingston Mills, over a lawn and around winding path, before it ended up in the canal with the four women inside.

The Crown alleges the Lexus was used to bump the Nissan into the water after it got hung up on the edge of the locks.

In the video, Yahya also told Mehdizadeh her brother once told her Mohammad wanted to kill Zainab.

“He had told my brother, yes,” says Yahya.

Read more

Canal trial delayed after dad's medical emergency
November 03, 2011


Hamed Shafia, centre, and his father, Mohammad Shafia, right, are led into a Kingston, Ont., courtroom earlier during their trial.
The murder trial was adjourned Thursday after Mohammad Shafia was taken to hospital the night before. (Lars Hagberg/Canadian Press)

The trial of a Montreal couple and their son who are accused of killing three sisters and a woman was postponed Thursday until next week in Kingston, Ont., because of a medical emergency involving the father, according to police.

The delay in the trial of Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, comes during a week in which the court has been hearing dramatic video of the accused under police interrogation.

They have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.

Mohammad Shafia was not with his wife and son as usual when officials led the two accused into the courtroom Thursday.

Shafia was not taken to Kingston General Hospital on Wednesday night as earlier published, but to the Lennox and Addington County General Hospital in nearby Napanee. He was being transferred to Kingston General Hospital on Thursday as a result of a fairly serious medical emergency, police said.

Although the judge did not specify which family member had taken ill, resulting in the trial's postponement, police later confirmed it was the elder Shafia.

It's unclear when the trial will resume, but the judge told the jury he would update them by next Wednesday.

Read more

Christie Blatchford: Long delay in ‘honour killing’ trial would leave difficult choices
November 03, 2011


Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed Shafia

It was, in retrospect, predictable as rain: Things were going way too smoothly at the honour-killing trial of three Afghan immigrants for it to last.

The trial flew off the rails on Thursday, when Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger told jurors that one of the trio of accused Shafia family members had a “fairly serious” medical emergency and that the case was indefinitely on hold.

As he sent them home for an unexpected break, the judge told jurors he hoped to have more news for them by next Wednesday.

Related
- ‘Honour-killing’ murder trial on hold after ‘medical emergency’
- Christie Blatchford: Mother accused of killing teen daughters had Karla Homolka moment with police

Until that moment, despite the usual bumps, the complex, high-profile trial had been right on schedule, courthouse staff had risen magnificently to handle a myriad of media requests for copies of exhibits (producing them the same day, virtually unheard of in the Canadian justice system) and even the technology (multiple DVDs played for the jurors on a myriad of screens, and simultaneous translation into the Dari language by interpreters sitting in a raised glassed booth) had functioned nicely.

Usually, all it takes is an ancient remote and a creaky old television set on wheels to send the courts into a tongue-clucking tizzy.

Though Judge Maranger didn’t explicitly identify which of the three accuseds was the sick one, the only one not present in the prisoner’s box was the 58-year-old family patriarch, Mohammad Shafia.

His second wife, 41-year-old Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their 20-year-old son Hamed were both in their regular spots.

All are charged with four counts of first-degree murder in what prosecutors Gerard Laarhuis and Laurie Lacelle allege was a multiple honour killing, motivated by the collective desire to purify the family honour, ostensibly damaged by the wanton behaviour of three of the family’s teenage members.

Found dead on June 30, 2009, in a black Nissan submerged in the Kingston Mills locks not far out of the city were sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, respectively 19, 17 and 13, and their so-called aunt Rona Amir Mohammad, who was actually Mr. Shafia’s first wife.

The girls were by the prosecutors’ account ordinary teens who loved clothes, makeup and their cell phones. The two eldest had boyfriends; young Geeti was openly defiant of her parents’ authority.

Yet by the strict Muslim code of their parents and oldest brother, prosecutors say, they were rebels disgracing the family name.

This week, the third of the trial proper, jurors had been watching videos of police interviews with Ms. Yahya after the trio were arrested on July 22, 2009.

The first of these, with a Farsi-speaking Toronto Police officer called in by Kingston Police, was emotional, showing Ms. Yahya pressing the pictures of her seven children into her face and sobbing uncontrollably.

Even the usually impassive Mr. Shafia had appeared distressed at the sight of his distraught wife, and wept.

The family is originally from Afghanistan, where the two most common (and official) languages are Pashto and Dari.

RCMP Inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh, a native of Iran who speaks Farsi and who was brought in to interview Ms. Yahya, has told the jurors that Farsi is to Dari what North American English is to British English.

Though the family came to Canada only in 2007, they left Afghanistan in 1992 and had lived abroad in Pakistan, Dubai and Australia for years.

Should Mr. Shafia’s health not quickly improve, Judge Maranger would be left with three options – a long delay of the trial, which would interrupt the flow of evidence; a mistrial, which would mean the proceedings against all three would have to start up again from scratch once Mr. Shafia was well, or severing the trial of Ms. Yahya and Hamed and forging ahead with this jury, leaving Mr. Shafia to be tried separately at a later date when his health permits.

While none of the three choices would likely satisfy all the participants, the system, and indeed society as a whole, has much invested in the case already.

A long delay, it could be argued, would cause inconvenience to jurors and might result in unfairness to the accuseds.

On the other hand, the seven women and five men of the jury already have given up much of their time, and know the case intimately.

And severance, lawyers for Ms. Yahya and Hamed could argue, would be unfair to them because the prosecutors quoted Mr. Shafia, as he was captured on police wiretaps, extensively in their opening statement.

His ghastly remarks – in one notorious conversation about his dead daughters with Ms. Yahya, he said “May the devil s— on their graves” – could unfairly prejudice jurors against all three, the lawyers could say.

The matter came to trial relatively quickly by Canadian standards – about 27 months after the three were arrested—but that modest achievement is now at risk.

Lawyers are due back in court here on Tuesday.


http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/03/christie-blatchford-long-delay-in-%E2%80%98honour-killing%E2%80%99-trial-would-leave-difficult-choices/

Shafia murder trial: Accused father to undergo surgery
November 03, 2011


Mohammad Shafia, 58, is seen in this image from his videotaped interrogation by police in 2009.
Shafia's murder trial has been adjourned until Tuesday, after he was taken to a hospital on Wednesday night.


The trial of three Montreal residents accused of murdering four female family members could continue, even if one of the accused is incapacitated or dies, according to a criminal procedure expert.

The nine-day-old trial of Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed, 20, was abruptly halted Thursday morning after Shafia was hospitalized Wednesday night because of a “serious medical emergency.” Neither police or his lawyer would reveal why.

The trial, slated to run for up to 10 weeks, was adjourned until Tuesday.

“One of the accused has taken ill,” Justice Robert Maranger told jurors, who could see that Shafia was missing from the prisoner’s box. “It was a medical emergency, a fairly serious one.

“We’re going to adjourn (the trial) until Tuesday for the lawyers to sort of get the feedback on the status of the medical situation.”

In an interview outside the courtroom, Shafia’s Kingston lawyer, Peter Kemp, said that his client was expected to undergo surgery Friday at a Kingston hospital. He said he didn’t know the nature of the problem.

“My understanding is, there’s some sort of a surgical procedure scheduled for (Friday) and I suspect the doctor’s going to say, ‘Well, until I do the surgery, I won’t know.’ ”

Kemp said he got a phone call at home at 7:30 Thursday morning from a Kingston police officer, telling him about the development. The news plunged the complex case into a legal limbo governed primarily by the wide-ranging discretion of the trial judge.

Queen’s University law professor Don Stuart said that if Shafia remains ill for a long time and is unable to come back to court, prosecutors could seek to continue without him.

“The Crown could bring a motion to sever (Shafia’s trial) and carry on with the other two,” he said.

Shafia could be tried later, once he has recuperated. Severances are normally considered before trials, but can be done after a trial has begun.

Shafia, his wife and son are being tried jointly, under provisions in law that allow the prosecution at one time of several people accused of committing a crime “that arises out of the same transaction.” The same rules provide that in the “interests of justice,” the accused can be tried separately.

“It just means whatever the judges think it means,” Stuart said.

Defendants can also seek severances.

Stuart said the other two accused could oppose a severance by arguing they would be denied the right to cross-examine Shafia, should he testify.

“Maybe the defence counsel would not want the trial continued,” Stuart said.

Staff Sgt. Chris Scott, the Kingston police officer in charge of the case, said in an interview that he learned of the medical problem at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

“It’s strictly a medical issue, no injuries from any assault or any third-party intervention,” Scott said. “I have no information it was a suicide attempt.”

Scott said Shafia was taken first to a small hospital in Napanee, just west of Kingston where the Quinte Detention Centre is located. It is a provincial jail where the three accused are held each night during the trial. Scott said Shafia was scheduled to be transferred to Kingston General Hospital.

As of noon Thursday, Shafia had not been moved to the bigger Kingston hospital, suggesting he is not critically ill, according to hospital personnel. Although the hospital does not publicly discuss patients, The Gazette has learned that Shafia has been taken from jail to the Kingston hospital six times in the past year for treatment of ongoing medical problems.

The judge told the jury that the trial has been going “very smoothly in terms of time” and he hopes it can resume as soon as possible.

“We want to, obviously, keep the trial going,” Maranger said, before sending jurors home.

Crown prosecutors had presented 17 of a possible 58 witnesses since the trial proper began Oct. 20. The 18th witness, an RCMP officer from British Columbia, was in the midst of his testimony about his interrogations, conducted in Farsi, of two of the accused, when the trial was stopped. The interruption likely poses significant scheduling problems for prosecutors and police.

Several witnesses from Europe were booked to fly to Canada this month to testify. Witnesses from Toronto and Montreal were to appear next week.

Shafia sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were found dead in a submerged Nissan Sentra at the bottom of a shallow canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009. The father, mother and son were arrested roughly three weeks later in Montreal.

Prosecutors allege the trio pushed the Sentra into the canal with another family vehicle and tried to pass the killings off as a car crash. They suggested their eldest daughter took the car on a joyride without permission.

Jurors have been told that Shafia, a native of Afghanistan, was angry and felt his honour had been tarnished because his daughters had boyfriends and wore revealing clothes. On secret police wiretaps, he was overhead saying that the girls were “treacherous” and acted like “whores,” Crown lawyer Laurie Lacelle said, in an opening address to the jury.

Shafia was recorded saying: “There is nothing more valuable than our honour.” The complete wiretaps have not yet been presented to the jurors.

Honour killing is an ancient cultural practice, still prevalent in some Middle Eastern and south Asian societies, in which women and young girls are killed by family members who believe it is the only way to cleanse a family’s shame. Disobedience, immoral behaviour and loss of virginity, even through rape, can provoke the murders.

Shafia moved his family from Dubai to Canada in 2007. The wealthy businessman, who imported and exported goods, including cars, settled in St. Léonard. He was building a sprawling, million-dollar home in Brossard at the time of the arrests.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Accused+father+undergo+surgery/5651621/story.html

‘Honour killing’ trial defendant moved to cardiac ward
November 04, 2011



A Montreal man on trial, along with his wife and son, for murder in the deaths of three of his daughters and his first wife, has been transferred to a hospital unit where heart problems are investigated and procedures are conducted.

Mohammad Shafia, 58, was taken to hospital in Kingston, Ont., Wednesday from the jail where he, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son Hamed, 20, are being held while they are on trial in Kingston.

The trio are accused of murdering four family members who were found dead in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal in 2009. All three defendants have pleaded not guilty.

The trial was abruptly halted Thursday because of Shafia’s illness. In court, the judge described it as a “serious medical emergency.”

Shafia’s lawyer, Peter Kemp, said his client was expected to undergo a “surgical procedure” Friday. Kemp said he did not know the nature or severity of the problem.

Shafia was first taken Wednesday evening to a small community hospital in Napanee, Ont., just west of Kingston, but he was later moved to the larger hospital, where he is in a section known as the cardiology lab. It treats patients who have cardiac problems.

Jurors were told Thursday that lawyers will meet next Tuesday to get an update on Shafia’s condition and to discuss whether the trial can continue.

The hearing began Oct. 20, and 17 of a possible 58 witnesses have completed their testimony. The 18th witness was in the midst of his testimony when the trial was adjourned.

Zainab Shafia; 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13; and Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were found dead in a Nissan Sentra at the bottom of the canal on June 30, 2009. The father, mother and son were arrested roughly three weeks later in Montreal.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/04/honour-killing-trial-defendant-moved-to-cardiac-ward/

'Honour killing' accused out of hospital



The Shafia multiple murder trial will resume Tuesday now that one of the co-accused has been released from hospital.

Mohammad Shafia was taken suddenly from the Quinte Detention Centre to hospital on Wednesday night experiencing what was described by the presiding judge as “a fairly serious” medical condition.

Shafia, 58, did not make an appearance in court Thursday morning, though his co-accused – wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and son Hamed Shafia – were there.

The three are charged with the first-degree murders of four family members. The bodies of three of Shafias’ teen daughters – Zainab, Sahar and Geeti – along with that of his first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, were found in a submerged car in the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009.

Judge Robert Maranger adjourned the proceedings Thursday morning.

At the time, evidence was being presented by RCMP inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh, who interrogated Tooba in Farsi on the day of their arrest in July of 2009. All three accused cried at different times during the showing of the interrogation video.

It was the first time Mohammad Shafia had displayed any overt emotion during the proceedings.

Mehdizadeh will return on the stand Tuesday and the interrogation video will be resumed.

“We are resuming on Tuesday, and Mr. Shafia will be there and the jury will be there,” said Alice Bradstreet, a spokeswoman for the local Crown’s office.

“He’s been released from hospital and he’s back at the detention centre.”

The nature of his illness has not been disclosed.

“We can’t release anything like that,” said Kingston Police sergeant Chris Scott. “From my understanding, there’s no [medical] conditions that would impact on the trial.”

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2011/11/04/18925996.html

Mohammad Shafia’s house rules
At the Shafias’, court hears, men were the law, women property and teen behaviour worthy of execution
November 04, 2011 (MACLEANS.CA)



On paper, Mohammad Shafia was the ideal immigrant, a wealthy, self-made businessman eager to inject his dollars into the Canadian economy. An Afghan who made his fortune in Dubai real estate, Shafia wasted little time setting up shop in his adopted country. In 2008, a year after arriving in Montreal, he purchased a $2-million strip mall in Laval—with a cash down payment of $1.6 million. He launched a company that imported and distributed clothing, household goods and construction material. And he chose the posh suburb of Brossard to build a sprawling mansion with plenty of room for all 10 members of his polygamous clan: himself, two wives and seven children.

The new house was still under construction on June 30, 2009, when three of the Shafia girls—Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13—were discovered at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, floating inside a sunken black Nissan that also contained the lifeless body of their “stepmother,” Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad. The four passengers appeared, at first glance, to be the victims of a late-night joyride gone horribly wrong. Within weeks, however, detectives in Kingston, Ont., offered a far more chilling version of events, laying first-degree-murder charges against a trio of suspects: Mohammad Shafia, the dead girls’ father; Tooba Yahya, their mother; and Hamed Shafia, their brother.

Today, more than two years later, the Shafia patriarch sleeps in a tiny cell with his eldest son. His wife—the one that’s still breathing—is locked in a separate prison. His mansion-to-be has been sold, his other surviving children (two girls and a boy) are under the watchful eye of social services, and his bank accounts have no doubt been decimated by mounting legal fees and lost profits. At the Kingston courthouse, where their murder trial is now underway, the accused threesome sits, ankles shackled, behind a thick plate of bulletproof glass. Outside, a police paddy wagon waits to escort them back to jail for the night.

For most people (especially Lexus drivers who can afford to pay cash for shopping malls), such indignities would be unbearable. But if prosecutors are correct, Mohammad Shafia is a man at peace. Despite everything he has lost—his three beautiful daughters, his first wife, freedom, hot suppers—he has supposedly salvaged the one thing that truly matters: his honour. As the 58-year-old declared during one intercepted conversation: “They messed up. There was no other way.”

No other way, prosecutors say, but to pile his “treacherous” daughters and infertile first wife into a car and, under the cover of midnight darkness, push it into the shallow waters of the Kingston Mills Locks.

The case raises troubling questions about a child protection system that has zero tolerance on bullying and sexual assualt but seems adrift when larger cultural issues are at play. The evidence put to the jury so far paints a damning portrait of life inside the Shafia world, where men were the law, women were property and typical teenage behaviour was a sin worthy of execution. According to the Crown, Shafia subscribed to an ancient unwritten (and very un-Canadian) honour code in which a family’s reputation hinges on the sexual purity of its females. Dad allegedly grew so enraged with his daughters’ Westernized disobedience—the revealing outfits, the cellphone photos of their boyfriends, the repeated visits from police and child welfare authorities—that mass murder became the only way to reverse the family’s “shame.”

Hamed, prosecutors say, was the obedient, curly-haired son who staked out potential crime scenes and tried, ever so clumsily, to cover up their tracks. (Days before his sisters drowned, someone using his laptop typed “where to commit a murder” into Google.) Tooba, wife number two, was an equally willing accomplice who, if the allegations are true, was with her men when the car-turned-coffin splashed into the locks, carrying three of the children that she once carried.

READ MORE

Shafia trial: Victims sounded alarm to youth-protection officials
Jurors expected to hear from officials teenage girls had turned to for help

November 05, 2011

In the weeks and months before the three Shafia daughters were found drowned in a car outside Kingston in June 2009, the teenagers had become more outspoken about their fear of their father and their desire to escape a turbulent home life.

On one occasion, two of the girls had asked a stranger to call 911 because they were afraid to return home.

Zainab, 19, the eldest child, ran away to a women's shelter; Sahar, 17, confided in teachers at school and told youth protection officials that she was being abused at home. Geeti, 13, a feisty, rebellious teenager, told school staff and a youth protection worker that she wanted to be removed from the house, prosecutor Laurie Lacelle told jurors in her opening statement last month.

However, on a few occasions, the frightened teenagers recanted their statements when they discovered that their parents would hear about what they had said, Lacelle said.

Despite the best intentions of youth protection officials, Montreal police, teachers and school administrators, the three girls and their father's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, would become victims of one of the worst mass killings that youth protection officials in Quebec have seen.

Mohammad Shafia and his second wife, Tooba, along with their son, Hamed, are accused of killing their three daughters and Shafia's first wife.

The Crown alleges that the girls were killed because they had dishonoured their family by having boyfriends and dressing inappropriately.

The three accused have pleaded not guilty, claiming the girls died by misadventure, when they took the family's Nissan Sentra on a joyride during a vacation and drove into a canal.

The gruesome trial is set to resume on Tuesday, and jurors are expected to hear from some of the people in Montreal whom the girls had turned to for help - youth pro-tections workers, school staff and police.

Their testimony may shed more light on what was going on inside the family's St. Léonard home before the deaths and help explain why none of the girls was removed from the home despite warnings that they felt threatened.

For privacy reasons, youth protection officials in Montreal would not comment on how they dealt with the family.

As a matter of policy, whenever there is a major incident with a child, youth protection officials conduct an internal investigation to review how the case was handled, said Judith Laurier, a spokesperson for the Association des centres jeunesse du Québec.

"We will look at the notes in the file to see if we could have done something differently and to make sure that the same situation doesn't happen again," she said.

"We (always ask) did we miss something; was there something that we should have known that we didn't?"

Sometimes, the review determines that youth protection officials did everything they could with the information they had at the time, Laurier said.

She said she didn't know whether a review has been done in the Shafia case.

In certain cases, youth protection officials sit down with other partners such as the police and school officials to see whether things could have been done differently or to determine if anything had fallen between the cracks.

When prosecutor Lacelle delivered her opening statement, she told jurors two of the sisters recanted stories of abuse after learning that social workers were going to question their parents about the allegations, and in one case, would do so with one of the girls present.

Laurier said many youth protection workers have received training in how to deal with families from other cultures and religions. However, she said youth protection laws apply to everyone.

"If a family comes from a country where physical abuse is tolerated, we tell them that in Quebec we don't tolerate physical abuse," she said. "We teach them how to discipline their children in other ways. We consider the family's history and values, but the law applies to everyone the same way."


http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+trial+Victims+sounded+alarm+youth+protection+officials/5661772/story.html