“Nothing is more dear to me than my honour”

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 at 12:03 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.

Mohammad Shafia was blessed with seven children, praise be to God. Three are now dead, allegedly at his behest. Three are living under a different roof, allegedly for their own safety. And one is on trial with him, allegedly at the crime scene—along with his mother—on the night his “treacherous” sisters were dumped into the Rideau Canal.

Yet to hear him say it, Mohammad Shafia was the model Muslim father: generous, selfless and never “meddling” in his kids’ affairs. “We were not a strict family,” he insists to his wife and fellow murder suspect, Tooba Yahya, in one conversation captured by police. “We were kind of [a] liberal family.” He recalls how he let his children play at the park, took them on Friday afternoon picnics, and if they needed money, he never said no. “You and I, we carried these children on our backs,” he continues. “We subjected ourselves to hardships, we took on drudgery for them, we wash their sh– and pee, we wash their clothes.” Continue…

A mother forced to face the truth

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Lars Hagberg/CP

Mohammad Shafia, the Afghan immigrant on trial for quadruple “honourcide,” spent the day watching video footage of his wife crying, denying, and finally crumbling, under hours of police interrogation. Later that night, the 58-year-old accused murderer was rushed from his prison cell to a hospital room, suffering from what the judge described as a “serious medical emergency.” Whether the recording triggered his undisclosed ailment, only Shafia knows for sure. But the content was certainly enough to make anybody ill.

At one point, as the camera rolls, Shafia’s wife buries her tear-soaked cheeks in a family photo album that contains the faces of all seven of her children: the four who are still alive, and the three who were dumped, allegedly with her help, into a watery grave. “I haven’t killed,” Tooba Yahya says, in between heavy sobs. “And I don’t want to talk.”

The cop trying to convince her otherwise is Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh, a Farsi-speaking Mountie who was seconded to the Kingston, Ont., force for the sole purpose of interviewing the accused “honour killers” in their native tongue. A veteran of major crime investigations, Mehdizadeh arrived in town just 48 hours before the arrests, but by the time he introduces himself to Yahya on the evening of July 22, 2009, he is well versed on the case file. “We know what has happened now,” he says, his words subtitled for the jury. “But we want to know why. Why have four lives been lost? For what?”

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The Shafia clan, in their own words

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 11:30 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 December.

Weeks from now, a jury in Kingston, Ont., will huddle in a private room to decide whether the heads of the Shafia clan—father, mother, and eldest son—massacred nearly half the family. Much of their discussion will revolve around cars: why one became an underwater coffin, whether another was a murder weapon, and what was said (or not said) inside a bunch of others.

In court on Thursday, prosecutors at the alleged “honour killing” trial provided a small sample of the latter, playing the first of many intercepted, in-car conversations between the accused trio: Mohammad Shafia, 58; Tooba Yahya, 41; and Hamed Shafia, 20. Their words fluctuate between incriminating and idiotic. At one point, Hamed himself says that the cops probably planted a hidden bug in their mini-van. “They can fasten something to record your voice,” he tells his parents.

In fact, they fastened it in the very day those words were utttered—July 18, 2009—while the threesome was inside police headquarters retrieving some of their dead relatives’ belongings. Continue…

“Where is your honour?”

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 10:13 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.

Prosecutors have told a jury in Kingston, Ont., that Mohammad Shafia was a tyrant of a father, an Afghan immigrant so obsessed with restoring the “honour” of his family that he drowned his own daughters because they wore make-up and dated boys and had dreams of their own. But during the opening moments of his post-arrest interrogation, broadcast in court for the first time on Wednesday, Shafia looks hardly the menace, slouched in a wooden chair and barely whispering his responses.

Wearing slacks and sandals, he tells the cop on the other side of the table that being slapped in cuffs was a “violation of his right,” that his life is “ruined,” and that the person who really killed his kids “should be found” and punished. Continue…

A question of honour

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 10:01 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 December.

Accused “honour killer” Mohammad Shafia returned to court this morning, nearly a week after being rushed from his prison cell to a hospital room with an undisclosed ailment. Dressed in a checkered sport coat and silver ankle chains, the 58-year-old was escorted to his reserved seat inside a bulletproof prisoner’s box. Within minutes, he was weeping. Continue…

Mohammad Shafia’s house rules

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, November 4, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

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.

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