The Shafia honour killing trial–Chapter 1

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:17 PM - 0 Comments

CP

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE HONOUR KILLING TRIAL:
	On the ebook in the Maclean’s magazine iPad app – Get the full story, plus, a week-by-week account by award-winning reporter Michael Friscolanti, as well as documents, video and audio evidence from the Kingston courtroom, and the heartbreaking diary of Rona, Shafia’s first wife and one of his victims.
	Or download our 10-chapter series detailing how the case unfolded.

The police diver who swam to the bottom of the canal found Zainab Shafia in the front passenger seat, her face slumped forward, her fingernails painted a light shade of blue. She was 19 years old and had 10 cents in her pocket. Her black cardigan, drenched after hours underwater, was on backwards.

Sahar, her younger sister, was in the rear of the sunken Nissan Sentra, dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a sleeveless top. Her belly button was pierced (a stud with twin stones) and her nails were polished two different colours: purple on the fingers, black on the toes. As always, the stylish 17-year-old was within reach of her cellphone—about to become a crucial clue for investigators above.

Geeti’s lifeless body was floating over the driver’s seat, one arm wrapped around the headrest, the window beside her wide open. Like Sahar—the big sister she idolized—Geeti had a navel ring underneath her brown shirt. Detectives would later find a note she had scribbled to Sahar, full of hearts and red ink: “i WiSH 2 GOD DAT TiLL iM ALIVE I’LL NEVER SEE U SAD!” She was 13.

Rona Amir Mohammad was slouched in the middle back seat, her soaked black hair rubbing against Sahar’s. At 52, she was the eldest of the dead: the girls’ supposed “auntie,” but in fact their dad’s first wife in a secretly polygamous Afghan clan. The day she drowned, Rona put on a blue shirt, three pairs of earrings, and six gold bangles. She was not wearing a seatbelt. None of them were.

It was June 30, 2009, the morning before Canada Day. Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster was supposed to work the afternoon shift, two ’til midnight, but his cellphone rang a few hours early. A colleague in the major crimes unit briefed him about the car full of corpses at the Kingston Mills locks, and asked him to come in as soon as possible. A few minutes after he arrived at police headquarters, three people showed up at the front counter to file a missing persons report: Mohammad Shafia, the girls’ father, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, their mother, and Hamed Shafia, their 18-year-old brother.

Dempster, a veteran cop with short blond hair and a rookie’s face, spent most of that Tuesday shift interviewing mom, dad and son, assuming, at first, that they were grieving relatives devastated to learn that their loved ones were gone. Their initial stories, videotaped for accuracy, were essentially the same. Wealthy Muslim family. Recent immigrants to Canada. Road trip to Niagara Falls, the 10 vacationers split between the Sentra and a silver Lexus SUV. Shafia, Tooba and Hamed all told the detective that they had stopped at a Kingston, Ont., motel on the way home to Montreal, and that Zainab grabbed the car keys to retrieve some clothes. The next morning, the Nissan—and nearly half the family—were gone. “That’s it,” Shafia said. “I don’t know anything else.”

But that was hardly it, as the detective soon realized. The more questions Dempster asked, the stranger their story sounded. Why would these women, after a six-hour road trip from Niagara Falls, pile into the Nissan for a middle-of-the-night joyride? Why did an eyewitness tell on-scene investigators that he saw two cars at the water’s edge that night? And why did the Shafias show up at the station in a green minivan—not the silver Lexus they were driving during the vacation?

Hamed, not a tear in sight, told the detective that he didn’t actually sleep at the motel with the rest of his family. Instead, he climbed back behind the wheel of the Lexus at two o’clock in the morning and continued toward Montreal, more than 300 km away. “I forgot my laptop,” he explained. He was home for only a few minutes, he said, when his dad phoned to tell him the girls were missing.

“How come you came back in the Pontiac?” Dempster asked, referring to the minivan.

“No special reason,” Hamed answered, mumbling about how the Lexus “takes more gas and fuel and stuff like that.”

“The reason for coming back in the Pontiac and not the Lexus was because it’s better on gas?” Dempster pressed.

“Well, that’s one of the reasons.”

“What would be another reason?”

“Nothing, uh, big,” Hamed replied. “Nothing, ya know, that’s worth telling.”

What police discovered over the next three weeks would tell a story so chilling, so unthinkable to most Canadians, that the resulting trial captivated the country like few crimes ever have. Mother, father, and eldest son—motivated by an ancient, barbaric “honour” code—used their Lexus to smash that Nissan over the lip of the Rideau Canal, watching with perverted satisfaction as all four females vanished into the water. “I am happy and my conscience is clear,” Shafia proclaimed the night before his arrest, unaware that a police wiretap was recording his every word. “They haven’t done good and God punished them.”

Today, a different punishment looms: life behind bars. After four months, 58 witnesses, and too many lies to count, a jury found Shafia, Tooba and their beloved Hamed guilty of quadruple murder in the first degree. It took just 15 hours of deliberation for the jurors to reach their verdict.

The evidence, utterly heartbreaking, left no real doubt about the truth. Before they died, the Shafia sisters were caught in the ultimate culture clash, living in Canada but not allowed to be Canadian. They were expected to behave like good Muslim daughters, to wear the hijab and marry a fellow Afghan. And when they rebelled against their father’s “traditions” and “customs”—covertly at first, then for all the community to see—the shame became too much to bear. Only a mass execution (staged to look like a foolish wrong turn) could wash away the stain of their secret boyfriends and revealing clothes.

Rona, it turns out, was simply a convenient throw-in, the infertile first wife who died as she lived. An afterthought.

“They committed treason from beginning to end,” Shafia declared, during another one of his intercepted rants. “They betrayed kindness, they betrayed Islam, they betrayed our religion and creed, they betrayed our tradition, they betrayed everything.”

His daughters died because they were defiant and beautiful and had dreams of their own. Because they were considered property, not people. But the two words at the heart of this sensational case—“honour killing”—do not tell the whole twisted tale. What happened on that pitch-black night is also a story about cries for help that were missed or ignored. About sibling rivalry and family snitches. About young love and old-fashioned police work.

And it’s a story about a custom-built courtroom, where father, mother—but not son—took the stand to proclaim their innocence.

Read the full ebook edition of the Shafia honour killing trial, available for purchase in the Maclean’s iPad app.
Or download the complete story as PDF.

Shafias expected to appeal guilty verdict

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, January 30, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Their guilty verdicts have sparked vigorous conversations about the difficulties of existing at a junction of cultures in a pluralist society. Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed were each found guilty of four counts of first degree murder in the conclusion of the high-profile “honour killing” trial for the murders of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13—sisters killed by their parents and brother —and Rona Amir Mohammad, Shafia’s first wife in a polygamous marriage.

“It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime,” said Justice Robert Maranger as he handed out three automatic life sentences with no chance of parole for 25 years to the three Shafias found guilty of drowning the four women and dumping them and their Nissan into the Rideau Canal.

But news broke Monday morning that lawyers representing the Montreal family will appeal the guilty verdict. At the time of sentencing, given the opportunity to speak, all three convicts insisted on their innocence. Mohammad Shafia, speaking through an interpreter, said: “We are not criminal. We are not murderers. We didn’t commit the murders and this is unjust.”

As word of the guilty verdict spread across the country on Sunday, many reflected on lessons that can be learned from the trial, which detailed how the Shafias, ashamed of the behaviour of their three daughters, plotted and carried out their murders. The story has been taken as an horrific exemplum of the complications of divergent values in a country such as Canada, especially for the children of traditionalist parents holding on to patriarchal power dynamics at odds with the norms of family life in Canadian society. Writing Sunday in the Toronto Star, columnist Rosie DiManno put it eloquently: “If there’s anything that should be learned from this trial, any warning we should heed, it’s to be alert, as a society to the secret lives of girls in gilded cages, ethnic daughters held hostage in their own homes by chauvinism and misogyny. Sadly, that is not uncommon.”

At least, thankfully, killing children in the name of family honour is uncommon.

Maclean’s

CTV News

Toronto Star

At the Shafia “honour killing” trial, the verdict is in: guilty

By Michael Friscolanti - Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 2:21 PM - 0 Comments

The night before he was arrested for drowning his beautiful Afghan daughters, Mohammad Shafia told his wife and son: “I am happy and my conscience is clear. They haven’t done good and God punished them.” Today, in a courtroom packed to capacity, all three “honour killers” received their punishment: life behind bars.

The guilty verdicts—to four counts each of first-degree murder—were the climax of a sensational trial that captivated the country like few crimes have. In the end, after months of testimony and 15 hours of deliberations, a jury agreed with the prosecution’s theory: that three immigrant sisters were executed by their own father, their own mother, and their own brother because they didn’t behave like good Muslim girls should. Their “treacherous” conduct—boyfriends, tight clothes, independent thoughts—had so shamed the family name that death became the only way to restore their tarnished honour.

What happened to Zainab, Sahar and Geeti was not a foolish wrong turn by an inexperienced driver. It was mass murder, planned and pre-meditated by the people who should have loved them most. Continue…

Fate of Shafias now in the jury’s hands

By Alex Ballingall - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 11:44 AM - 0 Comments

Now it’s in the hands of the jury.

After a bomb scare prompted a brief intermission Thursday, the Crown wrapped up closing arguments in the Shafia “honour killing” at the Frontenac County Court House in Kingston, Ont., where Mohammed Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their 21-year-old son Hamed have each plead not guilty to four counts of first degree murder.

Their blockbuster trial has grabbed the attention of people across the country since it began on Oct. 20. The evidence brought forward by the Crown has painted the Shafias as deeply driven by a concept of family honour — to the point where they decided to kill off four family members in order to, as Crown prosecutor Laurie Lacelle put it Thursday, “remove the diseased limb” from their family tree.

The three accused are charged with killing three Shafia sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti, aged 19, 17 and 13, as well as Rona Amir, Shafia’s first wife in a clandestine polygamous marriage. Their bodies were found strapped into the seatbeats of a submerged Nissan in the Rideau Canal in Kingston. The Crown has argued that the accused had planned to kill the four women and had pushed their vehicle into the water by prodding it with their own Lexus. Police recovered bits of headlight from their car on the scene, which the Crown presented as evidence during the months-long trial.

Justice Robert Maranger will begin charging the jury to determine the Shafia’s guilt Friday morning.

UPDATE (1 p.m. EST): Justice Robert Maranger issues his 200-page charge to the jury, indicating that they are allowed to deliver a verdict of second degree murder against some or all of the accused. All three face the possibility of conviction on first degree murder charges. A second degree murder charge does not require the same proof of planning and premeditation.

“If you are left with a reasonable doubt,” said Maranger, quoted by the CBC, “you’d find the accused not guilty.”

The jury will deliberate through the weekend.

Victoria Times-Colonist

The Globe and Mail

CBC

‘It was murder’

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

The Crown prosecutor made her closing remarks at the Shafia “honour killing” trial on Wednesday, telling the jury what she believes the evidence presented at the months-long trial proves. “This evidence alone establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that what happened to these girls was no accident,” Laurie Lacelle told the jury. “It was murder.”

Tooba Yahya, her husband Mohammed Shafia and their 21-year-old son Hamed Shafia each stand accused of four counts of first degree murder. The charges were laid after the bodies of four women—three of them girls between the ages of 13 and 19—were found dead in a car in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont. The three girls—Zainab, Sahar and Geeti—were the daughters of Shafia and Yahya. The fourth dead was Rona Amir, Shafia’s second wife in a secretly a polygamous marriage.

Lacelle took the jury through the evidence that had been presented to them during the trial. She talked of how pieces of the headlights from the family’s Lexus were found near the Rideau Canal where the submerged Nissan was found, suggesting they had nudged it into the water. She also questioned the credibility of Hamed Shafia’s testimony. He had previously told the jury that he was on the scene when his sisters’ car plunged into the canal, but that it had done so on its own as the driver tried to turn around. Hamed claimed he didn’t call 911 out of fear of his father’s reaction.

A day earlier,defence lawyer Patrick McCann had made his closing statement, arguing that account—however ridiculous—is the truth. “Hamed is guilty of being stupid—morally blameworthy—but other than that, he is not responsible for the girls’ deaths, nor were his parents,” McCann he said, quoted by . “It’s time to put an end to this Kafkaesque [episode] they’ve been going through for the past two and a half years, since the night of June 30.”

As the trial comes to a close, the defence maintains the deaths were an accident, while the Crown insists the Amir and the Shafia sisters were murdered by their family because they were thought to have dishonoured the Shafia name through alleged promiscuity and other disapproved behaviour.

UPDATE (11:30 a.m.): The Kingston courtroom where the trial is being held has been evacuated due to a security threat. A defence lawyer leaving the building reportedly indicated that there may have been a bomb threat, but that has not been confirmed by Kingston police. The trial, which was scheduled to hear more closing arguments from the Crown Thursday, has been delayed until 1 p.m. EST, and the three accused were taken away in a van.

CBC News

An allegation so unthinkable

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Vincenzo D'Alto

The Crown and the defence agree on at least one thing: as murder plots go, it was amateur hour.

The whole point (allegedly) was to cover up the mass “honour kill” by making it look like an incompetent wrong turn. Daughter takes car keys, daughter swerves off the road and into the Rideau Canal. But nothing about the “accident” scene looked accidental. Just to get to the water’s edge, the supposedly out-of-control Nissan had to jump a high curb, make a hard left around some rocks, then a quick right around a stone wall. As one investigator testified, “it would have to be driven there on purpose.”

Stupid plan. Simple conclusion. (Or, as another officer put it: “You guys aren’t hit men. You guys don’t know how to cover your tracks properly.”)

But what the jury in Kingston, Ont., must decide, as deliberations finally begin, is whether the absurdity of it all actually benefits the prosecution or the accused. In other words, was the alleged plot so boneheaded that it’s simply not believable? “If the plan was to make it look like an accident, why choose such a difficult place to get to?” asked Peter Kemp, one of the defence lawyers. “You’re trying to make it look like an accident, not make it look like someone knew exactly what they were doing.”

Continue…

A mother and son face the truth

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

CP

The jury has heard so many conflicting narratives, such wildly different versions of the “truth,” that the evidence sometimes resembles a real-life game of Clue. Shafia at the canal with the Lexus. Zainab at the motel with the car keys. Tooba in the Nissan with the four corpses-to-be (and a nasty fever that caused her to conveniently faint as soon as she heard the splash).

But this week—after three months in court, dozens of witnesses, and one epic round of cross-examination—two things became very apparent: the prosecution’s complete theory of the crime, as laid out in chilling detail by Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis; and the opposing storyline that defence lawyers seem to have settled on.

Hamed—and only Hamed—at the water’s edge with a rope. (To rescue the women, of course, not to kill them.)

When deliberations do begin, there’d better be lots of chart paper in the jury room.

Continue…

“We are not murderers”

By Michael Friscolanti - Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 7:04 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial.

Tooba Yahya steered the Nissan Sentra into an empty parking lot that night, knowing full well that everyone else inside the car—three daughters and a fellow wife—were about to die. It was all part of the plan, concocted well in advance with husband and son: they would drop the younger kids at a nearby motel, while Yahya waited in the darkness with the corpses-to-be. If she wrestled with any second thoughts, an urge to warn her girls about their impending execution, she fought it. The four passengers had no clue what was coming.

Such was the chilling scenario presented Friday by prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis, cross-examining Yahya for a fourth consecutive day. After dozens of witnesses and weeks of testimony, Laarhuis laid out the most detailed version yet of the Crown’s theory: father and brother rejoined Yahya at the Kingston Mills Locks, drowned the women (specific location unknown), stuffed their bodies back inside the Nissan, and nudged the car toward the water. But their master plan—to make it look like a joyride gone wrong—had one fatal flaw: the Sentra got stuck on the canal’s concrete lip. Continue…

Tooba the truth teller

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 11:11 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya wants the jury to know the truth: she’s a liar. A very, very big one. But not anymore. All those “lies” she blurted out 2½ years ago—especially that zinger about being at the water’s edge with her husband and son when half the family drowned to death—were the words of a desperate woman trying to escape the “clutches” of a police interrogator. She is being honest now, and she wants the world to finally know what happened that night. Except, of course, those crucial few details that she was too nauseous or feverish or sleepy to remember.

“Yes, I was intentionally lying,” Tooba admitted, when asked about that epic interrogation on the night of her arrest. “I was under a lot of pressure when I told him whatever I told him. It was all lies.” Continue…

The mother of all lies

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Lars Hagberg/CP

If the story is true—if Zainab Shafia really did ask for her mother’s car keys and embark on a deadly joyride into the Rideau Canal—that late-night knock at the motel door was the last time Tooba Yahya saw her eldest child alive. (The next time she laid eyes on her daughter, Zainab was zipped into a plastic body bag.) On the witness stand 2½ years later, she managed to recall that final conversation without any trace of a tear. “After I gave the keys to her, I changed my clothing, and without washing my face or cleaning my teeth, I went to sleep,” she testified. “I didn’t know anything else until the next morning.”

Minutes later, Yahya’s lawyer asked about the events of July 21, 2009, the day detectives searched her Montreal home and Quebec social workers seized three of her other children—for their own safety. “I will never forget that,” she wailed, burying her face in a Kleenex. “I requested them not to take my children because [the youngest] would not last without me. They did not listen.” It took more than a minute for Yahya to compose herself, her sniffles filling the courtroom speakers.

When the questions turned to the morning of her arrest, she was bawling yet again. “I saw with my eyes that they handcuffed Hamed and took my son away from me,” she cried. “To get Hamed out of that torture, whatever I was able to do I would have done it.”

Continue…

“He should have told us”

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 10:33 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial.

During her three days (and counting) on the witness stand, Tooba Mohammad Yahya has repeatedly told the jury about her husband’s annoying little “habit.” If something bothered him—if his children misbehaved, for example—he would talk and talk and talk. And then talk about it some more. “Most Afghani men have this habit,” she explained. “He used to repeat that thing for months and years.”

Her cross-examination has been equally tedious. Continue…

Shafia mother claims she lied to protect son

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, a mother accused of being implicated in the “honor killings” of three of her daughters and her husband’s first wife says she lied to police to protect her son. The Globe and Mail reports that Yahya initially told a Farsi-speaking RCMP officer investigating the case that she and her son were at the scene when the car in which the four victims died plunged into a canal near Kinsgton in the summer of 2009. On the stand, though, she rapidly retracted that statement. Yahya now contends that she, her husband Mohammad Shafia, and their son Hamed–all co-accused–were sleeping in a hotel in Kingston when the car ended up in the canal. Her teenaged daughters, Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, and her husband’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, were all found dead inside the vehicle. Yahya says her daughter Zainab fetched the keys from her hotel room, allegedly to retrieve something from the car, and that what happened afterward remains a mystery. Yahya, who lived in Afghanistan for 21 years before coming to Canada, also says she had never heard of so-called “honour killings” until police proceedings began in this case.

Globe and Mail

Mohammad Shafia sticks to his story

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Vincenzo D’Alto

Standing in the witness box, hand on the Quran, Mohammad Shafia promised to “state the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Allah.” And for a few minutes, at least, the accused “honour killer” did exactly that. He told the jury he was born in Kabul, Afghanistan (true), that he is a very wealthy businessman (true), and that he had two wives and seven children (true, until the night one of those wives and three of those children ended up at the bottom of the Rideau Canal).

Dressed in a beige sport coat, his face freshly shaven, the 58-year-old continued to lay out his version of reality: the Shafias were a “liberal family.” He always gave the kids as much money as they wanted, above and beyond their $100-per-month allowance. God—“no one else”—determines when people die. And although he offered plenty of fatherly advice, his doomed daughters were free to choose their own clothes, their own paths, and their own husbands. “I didn’t interfere,” he said. “It was their life.”

Then the questions turned to the wiretaps, those now-infamous rants secretly recorded by police in the days following the funerals.

Continue…

“My children did a lot of cruelty to me”

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 11:51 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into January.

Standing in the witness box, hand on the Koran, Mohammad Shafia promised to “state the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Allah.” And for a few minutes, at least, the accused “honour killer” kept his oath. He told the jury he was born in Kabul, Afghanistan (true), that his family was very rich (true), and that he had two wives and seven children (until the night one of those wives and three of those children ended up at the bottom of the Rideau Canal).

Then his testimony turned to the wiretaps. Continue…

The Shafias’ ancient, twisted code

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Vincenzo D'Alto; Crown Exhibit

In his final hours as a free man—unaware that wiretaps were recording his every word—Mohammad Shafia stuck to a familiar theme.

“We lost our honour.”

“I don’t accept this dishonour.”

“Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honour.”

“Isn’t that right, my son?”

During her stint on the witness stand, Shahrzad Mojab didn’t discuss those specific conversations. In fact, she didn’t once mention the shackled trio sitting in the courtroom prisoners’ box: Shafia, his wife, Tooba Yahya, and their eldest son, Hamed. But in a case that is all about culture and tradition and the fragility of a family’s reputation, Mojab’s expert testimony could prove most damning for the accused. Few have spent more time studying the one word that Shafia couldn’t stop saying—the one word that allegedly justified a mass execution.

Continue…

The defence calls: Mohammad Shafia

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 8:02 AM - 0 Comments

Colin Perkel/Canadian Press

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Mohammad Shafia was arrested three weeks after the car was found. By then, police in Kingston, Ont., were convinced that he, his wife, and their eldest son were responsible for the four dead bodies floating inside. “You are a wise man,” said Shahin Mehdizadeh, the Farsi-speaking cop sent to interrogate him. “I will prove to you that you had planned this.”

Piece by piece, the inspector laid out his evidence, each clue pointing to the same damning conclusion: a quadruple “honour kill” staged to look like a freak car accident. The passengers in that doomed Nissan Sentra—three of Shafia’s daughters, and his first wife in the polygamous household—didn’t make a late-night wrong turn into the Rideau Canal, Mehdizadeh told him. They were pushed in, rammed from behind by the family’s other car, a Lexus SUV. Continue…

“I would be a dead woman”

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 11:30 PM - 0 Comments

In one photo, Sahar Shafia and Ricardo Sanchez are cuddling on a living room chair, her arm wrapped around his. In another, snapped outside, Sahar is smiling in a pair of sunglasses, his hand resting on her stomach. The backgrounds change—parks, restaurants, sidewalks—but the poses rarely do. Some of the shots show only Sanchez, hat backwards.

Police found all the pictures, and dozens more, stored on Sahar’s cell phone, recovered from the same underwater car that contained all four dead bodies. Weeks later, detectives armed with a search warrant found printouts of those very same shots inside the Shafias’ Montreal home. Some were zipped into her brother’s suitcase, packed for an overseas trip. Two, depicting only her boyfriend, were stuffed in the centre console of her father’s Lexus.

“Do you have any idea how these photos ended up in a suitcase belonging to Hamed Shafia?” Gerard Laarhuis, one of the prosecutors, asked Sanchez. Continue…

“I love you with all my heart”

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 11:19 PM - 0 Comments

Colin Perkel/Canadian Press

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

If the allegations prove true—if Mohammad Shafia really did drown his own daughters because they were “whores” with boyfriends—then Tuesday must have been an excruciating afternoon for the accused “honour killer.” Sitting in the prisoners’ box, wife and son cuffed beside him, Shafia could only stare in silence as one of those boyfriends told the jury just how much he loved 17-year-old Sahar. They kissed. They cuddled. They fantasized about running away together. “It was very serious,” he said of their four-month relationship. “We could get married, I was telling her. And she was agreeing.”

The witness, who cannot be identified because of a temporary publication ban, spent an emotional chunk of his testimony reading out some of the text messages he typed to Sahar in the weeks before she died. He spoke slowly, the paper in his hands shaking. Continue…

“I want God to finish my life”

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 12:24 AM - 0 Comments

Colin Perkel/Canadian Press

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Zainab Shafia was found in the front passenger seat, her fingernails painted a light shade of blue. She was 19 years old and had 10 cents in her pocket. Her younger sister, Sahar (purple fingernails; black toe nails), was in the seat directly behind her, a sleeveless top covering her pierced belly button. Thirteen-year-old Geeti, the youngest of the dead Shafia girls, was floating over the driver’s seat, dressed in knee-length jeans and a brown shirt. Like Sahar, the big sister she idolized, Geeti had a stud through her belly button. Continue…

Before honour, reconnaissance

By Michael Friscolanti - Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 12:02 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

The cellphone photos appear to chronicle a typical family vacation: smiling faces on a hotel bed, a teenager in a bikini, the CN Tower. But the cellphone records—analyzed by police after four of those vacationers were found in an underwater car—suggest something far more sinister: an intense, week-long reconnaissance mission in search of the perfect murder scene.

It was June 2009, and the polygamous Shafias (husband, two wives, and seven children) were piled into a pair of cars for a road trip to Niagara Falls. By then, the family of wealthy Afghan immigrants had been living in Canada for nearly two years—in a household so divided and dysfunctional that one daughter told her vice-principal: “I’ve had enough. I want to die.”

Nineteen-year-old Zainab, the eldest of the sisters, had recently run away and married, a decision that disgraced the family to the point that even she agreed to a divorce. Sahar, the suicidal one, was showing up to school with bruises on her arms and tears in her eyes. Geeti, at just 13, was telling anyone who would listen that her dad was a monster and that she wanted to be placed in foster care. Rona, the infertile first wife, was possibly the most imprisoned in her new country: ostracized, ignored and prone to wandering alone through Montreal parks. Life, she wrote in her diary, was “a torture for me.” Continue…

Could someone have saved the Shafia girls?

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

Zainab Shafia (Canadian Press)

The “system” did not kill the Shafia sisters. If prosecutors are correct, and their midnight drowning was in fact a mass execution, the girls perished because their parents and their brother are “honourable” people. They are dead because they were beautiful and bold and very much Canadian, a combination that so disgraced the good Muslim family that nothing short of their corpses could reverse the shame. The “system” did not dump them in the Rideau Canal.

But it didn’t exactly run to save them, either.

As a jury in Kingston, Ont., is now hearing, detectives, teachers and child welfare authorities knew full well that the Shafia home was a toxic pit of abuse, fear and borderline enslavement. One of the doomed sisters fled to a women’s shelter. Another told a police officer, point blank, that her dad threatened to kill them. Yet another tried to do it herself, popping a pile of pills in a failed suicide attempt. “I want to die,” Sahar Shafia, then 16, told her vice-principal. “I’ve had enough and I want to die.”

Continue…

A loyal son, a ruthless brother

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Marcos Townsend/The Gazette

When police searched Hamed Shafia’s Montreal bedroom in the summer of 2009, they found a short essay written for a recent school assignment. The title was: “Importance of Traditions and Customs.” Today, inside a Kingston, Ont., courtroom—where Hamed and his parents are on trial for the mass “honour killing” of four family members—the essay has a new title: Exhibit #2.

“Traditions and customs are to be followed till the end of ones life,” Hamed wrote in his opening line, his mistakes marked by a teacher’s pen. “It doesn’t matter at all weather your close to the community following the specific traditions or living millions of miles away. Traditions and customs of a person is like his identity and what makes him special.”

Hamed was 18, toothpick skinny with a mop of curly black hair, when he printed those ominous words. The eldest son of a wealthy Afghan entrepreneur, he had immigrated to Canada less than two years earlier, and already enjoyed what most in his adopted country can only dream about: a Lexus in the garage, a wallet full of cash, and the inevitable inheritance of his dad’s multi-million-dollar business. (In one memorable car-ride conversation, captured by a police wiretap in the days before their arrests, father asked son if he had any small bills because “sometimes they don’t accept hundreds” at the gas station.)

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A history of violence at the Shafia home

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Rona (left) and Sahar Shafia (Canadian Press)

Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.

Mother and son have both confessed, in separate tape-recorded statements, that they were there when the car-turned-coffin plunged into the canal. Beyond that, their recollections couldn’t be more different. Tooba Yahya told police that she fainted after hearing the splash, and doesn’t remember anything else about “the accident.” Hamed Shafia, meanwhile, claimed that both his parents were actually fast asleep at a motel, and that his sister, Zainab, somehow steered the sedan into the Kingston Mills Locks while he and his Lexus were parked nearby. Hamed, of course, did what anyone would do if four of his closest relatives drove into a body of water. He tossed down a rope and wiggled it around, like a fisherman hoping for a bite.

As absurd as both stories sound, there is one common denominator: in neither narrative does Hamed dial 911. Continue…

Four funerals and a wedding

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Six weeks before her body was discovered in a sunken black sedan at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, Zainab Shafia was riding in a different car: her uncle Latif’s. It was May 19, 2009—the day of Zainab’s wedding reception—and the bride was wearing her dress, her skin painted with henna. She was 19 years old.

As Latif Hyderi steered toward the Montreal restaurant hosting the feast, he asked his niece, yet again, the question that was torturing her Afghan family, both immediate and extended. Why him? Why must you marry a Pakistani boy? (“Everyone, their heart was bleeding,” Hyderi explained on the witness stand last week. “Marrying a foreigner affected everybody.”)

Zainab’s answer was far more heartbreaking. “She said: ‘Dear uncle, there has been a lot of cruelty towards me,’ ” her uncle recalled. “‘There were many other boys who wanted to marry me. I rejected them. This boy does not have money and he is not handsome. The only reason I am marrying him is to get revenge for the cruelty of my father. I sacrifice myself for my sisters so they will get this freedom after me.’ ”

Continue…