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

Father asked for help killing daughter, court hears
November 08, 2011

snipped . . . . .

A relative of the Shafia family has testified in court that weeks before three sisters were found dead inside a submerged car, their father asked for help to drown one of his daughters.

The girls' parents and their brother returned to a Kingston, Ont., courtroom on Tuesday, after an unexpected medical emergency put their trial on hold last week.

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

They're accused of killing the three girls and one of the father's two wives in late June of 2009. The bodies of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were discovered in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont.

A relative of the family who can't be identified told the court Tuesday that Mohammad Shafia called him several weeks before the victims were found dead and asked him to invite Yahya and Zainab to his home as part of an alleged plot to drown Zainab.

The relative testified that Mohammad Shafia called Zainab a prostitute and said that he did not approve of her going on the Internet, visiting the library, hanging out with friends or having a romantic relationship with a young Pakistani man.

Earlier on Tuesday, jurors resumed watching the interrogation video of Tooba Mohammad Yahya. Minutes after the video began playing in court, Mohammad Shafia buried his face in his hands and began to cry.

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Court sees videotape of Shafia interrogation
November 09, 2011

Mohammad Shafia called his children liars and denied he had anything to do with the deaths of four members of his family in a police interrogation conducted the day after he was arrested.

A videotape of the two-hour interrogation was played Wednesday at the trial of the Montreal man, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son Hamed, 20, each charged with four counts of first-degree murder. They have pleaded not guilty.

Shafia sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were found dead in a Nissan Sentra submerged in a canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009. Rona was Shafia’s first wife, whom he married in Afghanistan, jurors have been told.

In the interrogation, RCMP Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh spends little time trying to build rapport.

“Have you killed them yourself?” he asks, before the interview is 10 minutes old.

“No,” Shafia replies.

“Have you helped in killing them?” the inspector asks.

“No,” Shafia says, insisting that he considered his children “pure and sinless kids.”

“I loved them with my heart,” he says in Dari. His interviewer, a native of Iran, speaks Farsi, a variant of Shafia’s language.

Mehdizadeh immediately calls Shafia a liar and implores him to offer a reason why the officer should believe him. Shafia invites the officer to give a reason.

“I have come to this country for its laws,” Shafia says, when Mehdizadeh says Canada is a country that has respect for all life.

Mehdizadeh tells Shafia that the victims did not die in an accident, as the family said publicly after the deaths.

“Someone has pushed them,” the officer says.

“This killer should be found,” Shafia responds.

A few minutes later, Shafia says his children “told a lot of lies,” including the false claim that he beat them.

“Then all of your children are liars?” Mehdizadeh asks.

“They are lying,” Shafia replies.

Later, Shafia acknowledges once slapping one child.

“Slowly I have hit like this in the face,” he tells the officer, as he taps the right side of his face with his right palm.

“That you should not come home late at night because here is very dangerous.”

The interrogation was done on the morning of July 23, the day after Shafia, his wife and son were arrested in Montreal. Yahya was subjected to a gruelling six-hour interrogation the night before, in which she said the trio was at the canal when the Sentra went into the water, though she claimed she did not see what happened.

Prosecutors allege the family’s Lexus SUV was used to push the smaller car over a stone ledge into the water. Bits of auto headlight plastic found at the site matched the Lexus.

“You were there that night,” Mehdizadeh says, after explaining some of the evidence to Shafia.

“I wasn’t,” Shafia responds.

“Your wife said you had been there.”

“No,” Shafia repeats.

“Your car was there that night,” Mehdizadeh says.

“Our car was at the hotel,” Shafia says.

The inspector puts the police theory to him about the motive for the killings, suggesting that as a good Muslim man he may have been upset with something his children did, including his daughter Zainab, who wanted to marry a young Pakistani man.

Shafia denies he had any concern about the behaviour of his children.

“We don’t have any issues,” he tells the officer.

Prosecutors claim Shafia believed his honour had been tarnished because his daughters consorted with boys, wore revealing clothes and disobeyed him.

“Where is your honour?” Mehdizadeh asks.

“My honour is my honour,” Shafia answers.

“You don’t have honour.”

“No, don’t say this word,” Shafia says.

Defence lawyers had a chance Wednesday morning to question a man who said Shafia tried to recruit him, during a phone call, to help murder Zainab.

Fazil Javid said he can’t produce any phone records to back his claim and he doesn’t know exactly when the call happened.

“It doesn’t mean that I didn’t talk to Mr. Shafia,” Javid testified, during questioning by defence lawyer David Crowe, who represents Yahya. Javid lives in Sweden and is a brother of Yahya.

Javid testified Tuesday he spoke to Shafia on the telephone in late May or early June 2009, while Shafia was in Dubai on business. He had hoped to intervene in a family problem with Zainab, who had run away from home and wanted to marry a young Pakistani man, against everyone’s advice.

Javid said Shafia asked him to invite Zainab, her mother and another sibling to Sweden, where they could go to a body of water and have a barbecue and then throw Zainab in the water and drown her. Crowe asked Javid why he said, during testimony at a preliminary inquiry, that the phone call was in early May.

“I might have been mixed up,” Javid answered.

Javid said he was at work in his pizza shop in the Swedish city of Oxelosund when he had the phone conversation with Shafia. He said he used a phone card to make the call and his phone service provider said it was unable to provide any record of the call.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Witness+record+murder+plot+call/5682266/story.html

Jury hears wiretap of accused in canal deaths
Police bug taped family members talking about night 4 females died
November 10, 2011


Tooba Mohammad Yahya and husband Mohammad Shafia and their son Hamed Mohammed Shafia
are escorted by police officers into the Frontenac County Courthouse on the first day of their trial
in Kingston, Ont., in October. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Members of the public in the courtroom for the Shafia murder trial shook their heads in disgust as the jury began to hear wiretap evidence of the three accused discussing the deaths of four family members.

Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 20, are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder.

The recording, from a police bug in the Shafia family van, captured the trio dismissing police claims that videotape might exist of one of the family's cars going into the Rideau Canal.

That car — containing the bodies of Shafia sisters Zainab,19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 50 — was discovered submerged in the canal in June 2009.


The Shafia car being pulled from the Rideau Canal in June 2009. Trial evidence photo

On Thursday afternoon, the court heard the three accused talking about the investigation, unaware that police were recording their conversation.

According to the prosecution's opening address, police had asked the family to come back to Kingston to show them how they believed the car accidentally went into the locks and claim some of belongings that were seized.

Police really intended to plant a bug in their vehicle and record the three accused as they drove back to Montreal.

Police claimed video existed

Investigators went back to the scene with the family that day, 20 days after the bodies had been found. One of the investigators told Hamed that police had recently learned there was a camera recording the site and they'd soon be analyzing the video.

According to the prosecutor, there was no such camera. But police led the family to believe there might be one for the purpose of recording their conversation.

On the way back to Montreal, on a recording played for the jury Thursday, the three accused discuss the possibility there might be a video. They quickly dismiss any notion of its existence.


Police told the accused that a camera on the white building seen in this photo
may have captured the car going into the water. Trial evidence photo

"No, had there been one there, they would have checked it first thing and they would have held you to account that night," Shafia is heard saying.

Yahya says it was pitch black outside and there was no glimmer of light. She says the police are lying and Shafia agrees.

The wiretap evidence came after another family member took the stand for the prosecution.

Yahya's uncle, Latif Hyderi, told the court that one of the sisters married simply to get revenge for cruelty suffered at the hands of her father.

Zainab had told Hyderi that she was sacrificing herself for her sisters' freedom.

Marriage annulled

Hyderi's identity was protected under a publication ban until his testimony concluded Thursday afternoon.


Latif Hyderi spoke to reporters outside the courtroom Thursday. Radio-Canada

Hyderi testified that he tried to convince Zainab to marry his son, but she refused. She said she wanted to marry her boyfriend to get out of her father's house.

The marriage went ahead, but left the family in turmoil. It was annulled after only one day.

When Hyderi told Shafia about the conversation with his daughter, he said it was a good thing he wasn't there, or he would have killed her.

Hyderi told the jury that Shafia called him and said his daughter was "a very dirty whore," and wondered why she was dishonouring her father.

He also said in 20 years, he'd never heard Shafia call Zainab by her name. He referred to her as a "black snake."

After he finished testifying, Hyderi spoke to reporters outside the courthouse and said this has been a terrible weight on his shoulders and he's relieved it's now been lifted.

The trial continues Monday with more of the wiretap evidence.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/10/shafia-trial-nov10.html

Surveillance camera triggers exchanges captured by wiretap
Police placed bug in the family minivan during visit to the scene where three teenage daughters and a 52-year-old women drowned
November 11, 2011

The three were in the family minivan, that most cozily domestic of North American vehicles, on a lazy July Saturday two years ago.

Some of the discussions were comfortingly banal. The mother phoned one of the kids at home to make sure he and his siblings had eaten and wondered idly, "Is this the motel we were in?" The teenage son, who was at the wheel, was often monosyllabic. The dad was now and then a back seat driver, telling the son where to turn.

But this was the Shafia clan, ex of Kabul, Afghanistan, now of Montreal, and they were a family straight out of the old Ramones' anthem for dysfunction, We're a Happy Family, one stanza of which went like this: "Daddy's telling lies, Baby's eating flies, Mommy's on pills, Baby's got chills."

Eighteen days earlier, three of the Shafia daughters (Zainab, Sahar and little Geeti, respectively 19, 17 and 13) and Rona Amir Mohammad, the 52-yearold woman who helped raise those girls and who lived with the family as an aunt though in fact she was the first wife, were found drowned in a submerged Nissan at the Kingston Mills locks just outside this city.

And now, the presumably grieving parents and brother - Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their precious eldest son Hamed - were in Kingston, being taken to the scene of the presumed tragedy by Kingston Police.

The police by now were highly suspicious of the clumsy tale the trio had told them - it involved a fake car accident, a lot of swooning by Yahya and a mysterious drive in the dark by the four women - and had planted a bug in the Pontiac Montana while the family was inside the police station.

They led them to the locks where a detective pretended to spot a small surveillance camera that had been put there for this very purpose, and shared the exciting "news" with the family.

The trio bit, and on their way back to Kingston and then to Montreal, their minimal conversation - it was as though they were almost spooked into silence but couldn't quite stop themselves - was markedly less benign.

Yahya: "There was no camera, they're lying."

Shafia: "Huh?"

Yayha: "There was no camera. If there had been a camera they would have taken that out first thing on the very first day."

Shafia: "Yeah."

Yahya: "It's been 20 days now."

(In fact, it was 18 days from June 30, 2009, when the Nissan with its cargo of death was discovered, but hey, who's counting?)

In another exchange a few minutes later, Yahya was back at it: "There was no camera over there. I looked around, there wasn't any. If, God forbid God forbid, there was one in that little room [an apparent reference to a building at the locks], all three of us would have been recorded."

Shafia replied, "No, had there been one there, they would have checked it first thing and they would have held you to account that night."

Later still, Shafia said to his wife, "That night there was no electricity there, everywhere was pitch darkness. You remember, Tooba?"

And Yahya, in a voice so serene it was almost unrecognizable as the one Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and the jurors have heard for hours of videoed police interviews, replied, "Yes."

These brief excerpts from the first of the wiretaps were played Thursday at the trio's trial on four charges each of first-degree murder.

They came as a sobering end to a day marked by the colourful testimony of Yahya's uncle, Latif Hyderi, an old mujahedeen from the days of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Now 65, still handsome and tough as nails, Hyderi had some important evidence to give - chiefly, that during the family crisis that spring over Zainab, who was so desperate to get out from under her father's control she agreed to marry two different boys, he had spoken to Shafia about it.

The father, who was in Dubai on business when the crisis erupted, was angry that Zainab was planning to marry a Pakistani boy (she did, for less than a day) and told Hyderi, "She wants to dishonour me" and then called her words so bad Hyderi apologized to "the souls of those martyrs [the dead girls]" before using them in court - "a whore. A dirty, a dirty woman."

Shafia told him, he said, to proceed with the marriage arrangements - to "call a mullah for this dirty lady, to get this girl out of the house" - but once it happened, Shafia told him "If I was there, I would have killed her."

Hyderi told court: "I said, she is your daughter, your child! Why did you marry your second wife so you could have children?" Shafia, he said, replied: "I'm not happy. She didn't do a good thing. If I was there, I would have killed her."

Hyderi admitted he served four years in jail in Afghanistan under the Russians. He was open about Afghan culture - "If a boy does what he does, he's free, he has the upper hand, but a girl, if she asks for her rights, she can't choose her clothing" - rueful and proud at the same time.

He said he tried once to explain to Hamed how it was in Afghanistan and how it was in Canada.

"We are thinking culture and tradition," he told him. "You are a young man, your brain is very good. You feel all the conditions of the outside world. You should make friends to your sisters.

"We are old," Hyderi told him. "We are still following the old culture of Afghanistan ... your sisters can't watch TV, go to parties ... they're like political prisoners.

"One day," he warned, "it will implode."

David Crowe, Yahya's lawyer, asked Hyderi in crossexamination if it was shameful, in Afghan culture, to marry a Pakistani.

Hyderi grinned. "This question is for Tooba," he said. "On 21st October, my daughter married a Pakistani boy."

The old warrior, in Canada 11 years and now a citizen, is adjusting - imperfectly, of course, but adjusting nonetheless.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Surveillance+camera+triggers+exchanges+captured+wiretap/5695345/story.html

Shafia daughter married for revenge, court hears


Zainab Shafia

Accused honour killer Mohammad Shafia called his daughter a “whore” for briefly marrying a young Pakistani man, a family member testified Thursday.

What's more, the young woman only married to get revenge on her father for treating her cruelly, court heard.

While Shafia was in Dubai on business in the spring of 2009, his eldest daughter Zainab got married, divorced, then engaged to another young man within a few days.

Shafia was angry, the relative testified, and told him: “If I was there I would have killed her.’”

About two months later, Zainab, two of her sisters and Shafia's ex-wife were found dead in a vehicle submerged in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont. Shafia — along with his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed — are charged with first-degree murder in the deaths.

Latif Hyderi, Yahya's uncle, said Shafia felt Zainab wanted to dishonour him.

He said Shafia described his daughter in a phone call as being “a whore.”

“She is dirty. She is a curse to me. She is a dirty woman,” Shafia allegedly said.

Hyderi testified that Zainab told him she only married the man to exact vengeance on her Shafia.

“The only reason I’m marrying him is to get revenge of the cruelty I get from my father,” she allegedly told him.

The mullah who wed Zainab granted an annulment, and over the next couple of days, Hyderi and Tooba made arrangements for Zainab to consider marrying a second young man who was related to Hyderi.

The two young people decided they liked each other and agreed that they would get engaged.

Hyderi said he also had some contact with Rona, Shafia’s first wife who was living with the family. He met her in the park one day and she told him how her life was in the Shafia home.

“‘There is a lot of cruelty and oppression practised on me by Tooba and Shafia,’” he recalled her saying. “‘They beat me two or three times. I am here as a servant, not a wife.’

“She said that, ‘I’ve been beaten several times and have been expelled from the house.’”

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DiManno: Marriage as an act of revenge and escape
November 11, 2011


Tobba Yahya and her husband Mohammed Shafee have been charged with four counts of
first-degree murder in the deaths of their three daughters and Shafee's first wife.

Raise the curtain, lift the veil, and step into the 12th century.

The mise en scene has been transplanted to modern-day Montreal.

It is Zainab Shafia’s wedding feast at a local restaurant. The Afghan-born teenager is marrying a Pakistani man and both families object to the union. Not a single member of the groom’s clan is present and the bride’s father is also absent, overseas on a business trip.

A cousin has loaned Zainab the dress she’s wearing. Her mother would not buy her one.

But this is no Romeo and Juliet forbidden romance. Zainab, willful girl, has selected as her betrothed a man she does not love. She has deliberately chosen a partner outside her Afghan tribe, of an alien nationality, guaranteed to enrage her father. It is an act of both spite and desperation.

She confesses to a relative: “Uncle, this boy doesn’t have money and he’s not handsome. The only reason I’m marrying him is to get my revenge. I will sacrifice myself for my other sisters. At least they will get their freedom after me.’’

Such sacrifice will not, as it turns out, proceed. And Zainab’s sisters — two of them, at least — won’t gain their emancipation as a result.

All three siblings, along with an “aunt’’ — Mother Rona as she was called, in fact the first wife to their father in a polygamous marriage — will be dead within weeks, their bodies discovered in a Nissan at the bottom of the Rideau Canal. Prosecutors contend the women were slain by intimate kin in a grotesque honor killing plotted to salvage their family’s reputation.

A day earlier, the traditional Muslim ritual of signing a nikah — the Islamic marriage certificate — had been conducted by a mullah. To all intents and purposes, Zainab is already wedded, though the marriage has not been officially registered yet in Quebec.

With only a dozen or so guests on hand, Zainab’s 18-year-old brother Hamed scowling in disapproval and the groom temporarily banished outside . . . . .


. . . . . Stressing that he was sorry and offering “my apology to the martyrs’’ — the victims — the witness repeated what Shafia had told him: “She (Zainab) is a whore. She’s dirty. She’s a curse to me — if I am the father.’’

Hyderi spoke with Hamed as well, who was so often left to act as eyes and ears for his father, to carry out his dictates. “Tell your father that maybe he doesn’t understand this (Canadian) environment.’’ The girls, he said, were being kept “like political prisoners.” He warned that “one day it will implode.”

Yet when Shafia came back from Dubai, the family seemed to have reconciled and were planning a motoring holiday to Niagara Falls.

Tooba described what had allegedly transpired between Shafia and Zainab upon her husband’s return.

“She told me that Shafia had gone up to Zainab’s room, kissed her on the forehead and forgave her.’’

But he had already decided to kill her, the Crown has said.

Peace, sealed with a Judas kiss.

READ the complete article here

Christie Blatchford: These young women are worth fighting for
November 11, 2011


Sahar Shafia, left, Zainab, top, and Geeti hungered for so little, Christie Blatchford writes.

One day last week at the trial of the Shafia family in Kingston, Ont., as court was hearing a relative describe the small freedoms the teenage girls in that family so hungered for – Canadian friends, makeup and clothes, the company of boys — I found there were tears streaming down my face.

They had wanted so bloody little.

The thought that their modest desires could have cost them their lives – and that is the central allegation at trial, that in their ordinary rebellion they had offended the family honour and paid for it with their lives – was egregious enough.

That this had happened, allegedly, in Canada was intolerable.

They were Afghan girls. Only the oldest two – Zainab and Sahar, respectively 19 and 17 – were actually born in that hard country, but as the jurors in the trial of the girls’ parents and brother have heard, all the Shafia children were raised in the Afghan way.

There’s something to be said for this; Afghans are of necessity among the toughest and most resilient people on the planet.

But their society and culture is also tribal, primitive and misogynist: As an uncle testified this week, boys have their freedom, but girls do not. An Afghan proverb puts it this way: A girl is the property of others.


A court sketch shows Mohammad Shafia, left, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, right, and
their son Hamed Shafia sitting in the dock in the courthouse in Kingston, Ont., on Oct. 20.


The family left Afghanistan in 1992 but, except for a short stint in Australia, until they arrived in Canada in 2007, they lived in the Middle East, in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, where it is easier to raise good, obedient Muslim daughters.

But, as with all the children of immigrants, once in Canada, once enrolled in mixed schools, the Shafia girls wanted nothing more than to be normal Canadian kids; instead, according to two relatives who have testified at trial, they lived like political prisoners.

Zainab, Sahar and their little sister Geeti, just 13, fought ferociously for their small freedoms: The older girls had boyfriends; Geeti, acting out as girls whose sexuality is utterly denied and oppressed often do, was failing at school, wearing revealing clothing and was once caught shoplifting.

Geeti made no secret of the fact she wanted out of that house, whatever it took; Sahar disclosed to school officials, and later to Montreal Police, that there was violence in the home. Zainab ran away to a women’s shelter, and only returned home when her mother promised she could marry – her only sure ticket out of her father’s control. Some of their kids once even begged a stranger on the street to call 911 for them, they were so afraid of their father’s wrath, this when Zainab had run away.

Quebec youth protection services twice investigated the family, and twice closed the file.

So there were these Afghan girls, with just a taste of freedom and wanting more, fighting valiantly and all but shrieking from the rooftops. And who was fighting with them?

Few, it appears from the evidence heard at trial, in civilian Canada.

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'To hell with them' — father in honour killing trial caught on tape
November 14, 2011



The Montreal man accused with his wife and son of killing four people, including three of his daughters, was captured on secret police wiretaps talking often and angrily about his lost honour and disparagingly about his dead children.

Jurors at the murder trial of Mohammad Shafia 58, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son Hamed, 20, have now heard all of the secret recordings made by police in a four-day span in 2009, just before the three were arrested July 22, 2009 and charged.

They are each on trial on four counts of first-degree murder. They have pleaded not guilty.

"They're gone now, shit on their graves," Shafia says in a recording of a conversation with his wife and son that was captured inside the family's minivan on July 20, 2009.

"I am happy and my conscience is clear," he says, in a recording made the following day, while the trio was inside the van. "They haven't done good and God punished them."

Several times during the recordings, Shafia is heard complaining that his daughters were promiscuous, that they sinned and fornicated.

"Damn their boyfriends," Shafia says, in a recording in the van on July 18. "To hell with them and their boyfriends . . . filthy and rotten children."

The bodies of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were found in a Nissan Sentra submerged in a canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009. Rona was Shafia's first wife, whom he married in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors allege that the murders were honour killings, designed to cleanse shame that Shafia felt the victims brought on the family.

The recordings are littered with seemingly incriminating and cryptic exchanges.

"I know (Zainab) was already done, but I wish two others weren't," the accused mother says, in a recording inside the van from July 20.

"No, Tooba, they messed up," Shafia replies. "There was no other way."

The same recording captures Shafia telling his wife that he could not stand to see pictures of his daughters dressed in revealing clothes with boyfriends.

"When I tell you to be patient, you tell me that it is hard," Shafia says. "It isn't harder than watching them every hour with (boyfriends).

"For this reason, whenever I see those pictures, I am consoled. I say to myself, 'You did well. Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again.' "

In a conversation Hamed had by telephone with a relative early on the morning of July 22, he was warned about his situation.

"Look, Hamed, you are 100 per cent caught," the relative says.

"They are making stuff up, don't say these stuff on the phone," Hamed replies.

The relative cannot be named under a broad court order that bars the publication of any information that would identity the person. The conversation was recorded a few hours after police arrived unexpectedly at the Shafia home in Montreal on July 21 armed with a search warrant. The family was shown the warrant, which said that they were suspected of murder.

Hamed talked to the relative again by phone roughly half an hour after the first call.

"Don't do anything stupid," the relative says. "Cause Hamed, you guys think of suicide and all that, don't do it. OK?"

Hours later, the three family members were arrested in Montreal. Hamed and his father were placed together inside a bugged police vehicle.

On the tape, Hamed expresses concern about his mother.

"It's not difficult for me, these (hardships). . . . She might lose her mind," he says to his father.

"Your poor mother," Shafia says, later in the same conversation. "May God's fury descend on those girls."

Later the men express concern about what Yahya has said to police.

"What do you think, what is the truth now?" Hamed asks his father.

"Perhaps your mother has made a mistake, said something in the car," Shafia responds.

In other conversations, Shafia seems to be consoling his family members about the hardship they are enduring. In a recording inside the family minivan late on the evening of July 21, Shafia tell his wife and son to be strong.

"There is nothing more valuable than our honour," Shafia says. "I am telling your mother that be like a man as you have always been. I know it hurts . . . don't worry at all, don't regret."

He adds that "there is no value of life without honour."

Shafia says his daughters were "treacherous" and betrayed Islam, dishonouring the family.

"Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows . . . nothing is more dear to me than my honour," Shafia says, speaking to Hamed in a July 21 recording inside the van. "Let's leave our destiny to God and may God never make me, you or your mother honourless. I don't accept this dishonour so don't think about it anymore."

In one of the recordings, Shafia tells his wife and son that they were not a strict family but "kind of liberal" and that nothing he did amounted to "meddling" in the lives of his daughters.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/hell+with+them+father+honour+killing+trial+caught+tape/5708125/story.html

Father accused of honour killings called eldest daughter a ‘whore’
November 14, 2011

In the days leading up to the July, 2009, arrest of an Afghan-Canadian businessman and his wife and son, all accused of jointly murdering four family members, the man’s conscience was clear because the victims had violated every decent principle, he said in wiretapped conversations.

“It was all treason, they committed treason from beginning to end,” Mohammad Shafia told the other two accused, as police listened in. “They betrayed humankind, they betrayed Islam, they betrayed our religion and creed, they betrayed our tradition, they betrayed everything.”

In other wiretapped remarks, Mr. Shafia singled out his eldest dead daughter for particular abuse: “Is that what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore?”

Mr. Shafia said, moreover, that he would do the same thing again, “even if God forbid, they hoist us onto the gallows.”

Yet at the same time, the family patriarch seemed to see himself as tolerant.

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Man accused of killing daughters cursed them as 'treacherous,' court hears
November 14, 2011

snipped . . . . .

Court has heard that much of the family turmoil surrounded Zainab and her boyfriend, whom she married for one day, and relatives have testified that Shafia wanted to kill her. Yahya is heard on one intercept saying she knew Zainab was "already done," but she wishes the "two others" weren't.

"No Tooba, they were treacherous," Shafia says, likening them to prostitutes. "When I tell you to be patient, you tell me that it is hard. It isn't harder than watching them every hour with (boyfriends). For this reason whenever I see those pictures, I am consoled.

"I say to myself, 'You did well. Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again,'" Shafia says on the intercepts, translated from their native Dari, a dialect from Afghanistan. "That is how hurt I am. Tooba, they betrayed us immensely. They violated us immensely. There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this."

Shafia repeats his apparent threat about "a hundred times" on another intercept, saying, "If I have a cleaver in my hand, I will cut him/her in pieces."


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Shafia son urged not to commit suicide, court told
November 15, 2011

The night before Hamed Shafia was charged with four counts of first-degree murder, a family member begged the young man repeatedly not to take his life.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” the relative told him in a conversation recorded on police wiretaps.

“Cause, Hamed, you guys think of suicide and all that, don’t do it. OK?”

Just six hours earlier, Kingston and Montreal police had entered the Shafia home with a search warrant and informed Hamed, along with his parents, Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Mohammad Yahya, that they were suspects in the deaths of the Shafias’ three teenaged daughters and Mohammad’s first wife.

The bodies of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, and that of Rona Amir Mohammad, had been discovered in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009.

When police left the Shafia house the night of July 21, they also left behind wiretaps that picked up the family's conversations.

The family member talking to Hamed that night was not reassured by Hamed’s reaction and pressed the issue of suicide.

“One thing I’m saying Hamed, you Hamed, please for God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t do nothing,” Hamed replied. “Nothing will happen right now.”

Yet again, however, the relative begs Hamed to think about the impact of suicide on his family.

“Yeah. Our life is over for us. That’s all I’m telling you,” Hamed replied.

Four days before the arrests, Kingston Police asked the Shafias to come to Kingston to pick up the belongings of their dead family members.

While they were at the station, police installed wiretap devices in the family minivan.

Police also received permission to tap Hamed’s cellphone, the third source of the surveillance recordings heard in court Monday.

Jurors got to hear the full conversations between the Shafias that were alluded to in the Crown’s opening statements on Oct. 20.

The Crown alleges the girls were killed because they were dating young men and wearing revealing clothes, against the wishes of their parents.

During one of the minivan intercepts, Mohammad denies ever meddling in the girls’ affairs.

“They committed treason themselves. It was all treason, they committed treason from beginning to end,” he says to Tooba.

In a later wiretap from July 19, Mohammad is heard saying: “God curse their graduation! Curse of God on both of them, on their kind … may the devil shit on their graves!

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

When police left their home the night of July 21, they took away a number of personal effects, including passports and the laptop computer.

Mohammad, Hamed and Tooba can be heard frantically searching around the house to see what was missing.

“Oh God, what kind of disasters have you brought over me. Oh God,” says Tooba.

“They even pulled out the wall plugs. They probably put something in them.”

The next day, Kingston Police decide to make their arrests, with Montreal police pulling over the three Shafias and a friend at a city intersection.

While waiting in a police car, Hamed and Mohammad speak with one another in Farsi, unaware that they are being recorded.

At one point they have this conversation:

Shafia: "Don’t worry, my son."

Hamed: "I’m not worrying, only about my mother."

Shafia: "It’s OK, my son."

Hamed: "It’s not difficult for me … she can’t, she might lose her mind."

Shafia: "Whatever is God’s will. It’s a false accusation.”

Kingston Police officers tell them they are waiting to drive to Kingston and that Tooba would be travelling in a separate vehicle.

“Your poor mother,” says Shafia. “May God’s fury descend on those girls.”

Since July 18 and their trip with police to Kingston Mills, the question of whether there was a surveillance camera kept popping up in conversations among the three.

Again it was raised on the drive to Kingston:

Hamed: "What do you think, what is the truth now?"

Shafia: "I don’t know."

Hamed: "Is it possible?"

Shafia: "Perhaps your mother has made a mistake, said something in the car."

Hamed: "(Do you think) there was that thing there or not?"

Shafia: "Everything will be clear at court.”

Jurors also watched the July 22 interrogation of Hamed at the Kingston Police station with Const. Steve Koopman.

Koopman cautions Hamed that police had changed their thinking from a “sudden death investigation to a murder investigation” based on evidence they had been gathering.

Ten members of the Shafia family left Montreal on June 24 for a vacation in Niagara Falls.

They stopped in Kingston in the early hours of June 30 and booked two motel rooms.

The next morning, Parks Canada staff discovered the family’s black Nissan Sentra in the water above the locks at Kingston Mills with the four bodies inside.

The three Shafias insisted in police interviews and interrogation the entire family had gone to the motel that night but that the four women left sometime during the night in the Nissan and mysteriously ended up in the canal.

In the the July 22 interrogation, Koopman asks Hamed when his dad last saw the girls alive.

Hamed says he doesn’t know.

“I haven’t spoken much about it with him,” he said.


http://www.torontosun.com/2011/11/14/father-said-daughters-committed-treason-court-hears

Shafia brother denied involvement in deaths
November 15, 2011



One of the accused in the deaths of three sisters and another woman denied any involvement or knowledge of what took place leading up to the discovery of their four bodies in the Rideau Canal, a Kingston, Ont. court heard Tuesday.

During a three-hour police interrogation played for court, Hamed Shafia, 21, remained steadfast. He appeared at times evasive, crossing his arms and falling silent when police presented him with evidence they’d gathered about the murder of his sisters and his father’s first wife.

At other points, he demanded police show him photos of the family’s Lexus SUV, pieces of which police claim were found near the spot were the family’s car went into the water.

The Shafia sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were found dead inside a car submerged in the canal in June 2009.

Hamed, his father Mohammad Shafia, 58, and mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, all face four first-degree murder charges each in their deaths. They have pleaded not guilty.

The jury in the trial watched the video of Hamed’s interrogation after days of hearing wiretap evidence of the three accused secretly recorded by police.

In those wiretap tapes, the accused are heard discussing their concern that everyone sticks to the same story.

Investigators planted microphones in the family’s van, their home and recorded conversations in the police vehicles on the day they were arrested.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/15/mtl-shafiasoninterrogation.html

Shafia son claimed mom had nothing to do with deaths
November 15, 2011

snipped . . . . .

A Kingston jury watched video Tuesday of Hamed's interrogation, in which police officers question him about inconsistencies in his earlier statements.

Hamed, along with his parents, insisted to police that they had no idea what happened to the victims and it had to be a terrible accident.

But at one point in the four-hour interrogation, Det.-Const. Steve Koopman tells Hamed that police could put him at the scene and asks, "Did you mean to get involved with this?"

"No," Hamed says, hanging his head.

During Tuesday's proceedings, court heard that Hamed also asked about his mother's well-being and said she had talked about suicide since the deaths of her three daughters.

"My mom, she doesn't have anything to do with it," Hamed says. "I told you before. She's (had) like nothing to do with it because she was not even herself that night. She was really tired, she had no idea where we are and everything."

He said she took some pills and fell asleep during the night in question.

Police also questioned Hamed about why he can't explain the pieces of the headlight of the family's Lexus SUV that ended up at the scene of the deaths.

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Brother in ‘honour killing’ trial took keen interest in photos of his dead sisters
Christie Blatchford November 16, 2011


Hamed Shafia and his father, Mohammad, leave Kingston court Tuesday. A court video showed Hamed asking repeatedly to see photos of his sisters, Zainab, Sahar and Geeti.


In the morning it was starkly ghoulish, with Hamed Shafia, in a four-hour-long interview on the day of his arrest for murder, livening up only when the officer interrogating him brandished pictures of his dead sisters and his father’s first wife.

“Can I . . . ?” he asked, alertly eyeing the photographs in Kingston Police Sgt. Mike Boyles’ hand.

“No, you know what?” Boyles replied. “Why should you look at them if you can’t look at me and tell the truth . . . Why would they (meaning Hamed) want to see them (the dead women) like this? You can’t even tell the truth of how they ended up like that.”

Nonetheless, Boyles handed over the pictures, which showed the bodies of two of Hamed’s three sisters — Zainab, Sahar and Geeti — and his father’s first wife Rona Amir Mohammad, as they were recovered from a black Nissan found submerged at the Kingston Mills locks on June 30, 2009.

“So it’s the time when they remove them?” asked Hamed, who is now 20 and then just 18.

“Yeah, this is them being brought out of the water, yeah Hamed,” Boyles said.

“How come she’s bleeding?” Hamed asked. He didn’t appear to be disturbed, merely interested, as if he were a college student on a tour of a morgue.

Boyles explained, not unkindly, that the girl wasn’t bleeding, but that what he was seeing was the result of blood pooling in the body, as it does at death.

“There are only two sisters there,” Hamed said, obviously keen on seeing the third picture as well.


Geeti Shafia, 13

The detective didn’t hand it over immediately, but continued banging his head against the wall that was this boy for a while longer.

Then he said, “Did you want to see these again?”

“After this, we’re done?” Hamed asked.

They chatted a bit more — Boyles asking if Hamed felt badly about what happened to his sisters, Hamed saying that, of course, he did.

At last, he leaned in and took the pictures.

“The position they were that time . . .” he began.

Boyles told him drowning was not a peaceful death, that it was horrible. The news, if it was news to him, washed over the boy and disappeared.

“Like the position you’re in (when you drown), that position you come out? You get stuck in that position, I guess?” he asked.

“Sure Hamed,” Boyles replied. “I’m not a doctor.”

So that was the morning session, this boy with his unseemly interest in seeing the bodies of his sisters.

Later, came a witness — he can’t be identified yet — who brought a welcome measure of unintended hilarity to the proceedings.

This fellow, a fellow Afghan and former student at Queen’s, was hired as an interpreter by Shafia’s lawyer, Peter Kemp, and, unknown to Kemp, also by Shafia to re-investigate the case, or, as the witness put it, to “try to uncover the truth.”

In the course of this, he managed to review all the disclosure prosecutors had made to the defence, and show the accused trio, as he said, “what police had against them.” He visited each in prison, immediately pronounced Shafia (who famously cursed his dead daughters as whores and prayed the devil would foul their graves) a deeply religious person incapable of lying, let alone worse, and told Hamed “just speaking with you for five minutes is enough for me to know you are not that kind of guy.”

The witness was a one-man show: He did imitations of Yahya’s strident voice and heavy accent from the Parwan area north of Kabul, and, as he gravely listened to his own recorded chat with Hamed, which he later duly presented to the police so “they could learn from their mistakes, reconsider their decision and discharge” the Kingston trio, he compulsively made notes “to help the court.”

Praise Allah water isn’t the only thing that seeks its own level.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/15/brother-in-honour-killing-trial-hamed-shafia-took-keen-interest-in-photos-of-dead-sisters/

Young man admits nothing in videotaped Kingston police interrogation

snipped . . . . .

Hamed was presented by the Kingston police with four pieces of evidence: cellphone records that showed he was in the Kingston area at a time when he insisted he was still in Niagara Falls; evidence that shards of headlight glass belonging to the Lexus were found at the lock; numerous incriminating remarks the three accused made, overheard on police wiretaps; and – perhaps the most difficult to explain away – a statement his mother had just given to police acknowledging that the three accused were in fact at the lock that night, and heard the Nissan containing the girls fall into the water with a splash.

Exactly what transpired she could not say, Tooba Mohammad Yahya added, because she fainted almost immediately.

In turn, two detectives questioned Hamed: Detective Constable Steve Koopman, who took a relaxed, almost conciliatory approach, even as he told Hamed he had no doubt he was guilty, because of the facts; and Sergeant Mike Boyles, who was more confrontational.

“Was this a train going down the tracks, something you couldn’t control?” Det. Constable Koopman said of the events that night. “It was probably your dad’s decision, I don’t think this was something you wanted to happen. … I know you miss your sisters.”

Sgt. Boyles later piled on the pressure: “There’s a lot of evidence, there’s no hiding this any more.” But he, too, tried to appeal to Hamed’s sense of family honour and loyalty: “Zainab and Sahar, and Geeti, and Rona too – they would want me to find the truth.”

Hamed replied mostly in monosyllables, saying he knew nothing, but asking many questions of his own, anxious to know what evidence the police had gathered. And he stuck to the story that Zainab and the others had taken the Nissan for a joyride that night, while the family was staying overnight at a Kingston motel, and had somehow driven into the lock.

All four women drowned, autopsies showed, but where and when has never been established. Three of the victims had fresh bruises on their heads, and one of the car windows was wide open, leading police to believe the drowning took place before the Nissan tipped into the water.

As for his mother’s statement that she and the other two accused were in fact at the lock, Hamed seemed trapped. He could not agree with her, but neither was he willing to call his mother a liar. He was shown a video clip of her police statement, and could say nothing.

He asked to be taken back to his police cell.

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