Did Canadian honor killing end in death of 4 women? [Archive]

Dakota Valkyrie

July 23rd, 2009, 11:14 AM

http://i29.tinypic.com/nqstc0.jpg
Mohammed Shafi and his wife Tobba Yahya
The tale of three Montreal sisters and their aunt who were found dead in their car in the Rideau Canal in Kingston has taken a dramatic turn with the arrest of three family members, who may have been trying to flee the country.
[...]

The three suspects, believed to be the sisters' father, Mohammed Shafi, his wife, and his 18-year-old son, were apprehended yesterday morning while heading to Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, possibly to flee the country, La Presse newspaper reported, citing unnamed police sources. They were taken to Kingston.

The Shafi sisters – Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17 and Geeti, 13 – died along with their aunt, Rona Amir Mohammed, on June 30. The family was returning from a trip to Niagara Falls and Toronto when they stopped for the night at a motel in Kingston.
[...]
http://www.thestar.com/article/670481
http://i31.tinypic.com/e8mr89.jpg
A photo sent to Kingston Police by
Diba Masoomi, of France, who claims
the photo shows Mohammed Shafi
marrying Rona Amir Mohammed
30 years ago in Kabul, Afghanistan.

It's not clear what charges are being laid, but The Whig-Standard learned that Kingston Police have been investigating, for at least two weeks, the allegation that the deaths were an honour killing.

"We are convinced that this is a crime of honour," Diba Masoomi told Kingston Police, in an email sent to the police chief's office roughly two weeks ago.

The newspaper obtained a copy of the email from Masoomi, who lives in Niort, France. She claims she is the sister of Rona Amir Mohammed and she also offered the stunning allegation that the dead woman was the first wife of Mohammed Shafi, the father of the three dead girls.

She provided photos that she claims show Shafi and Mohammed at their wedding in Afghanistan 30 years ago. The couple never divorced.

Masoomi said the marriage has been hidden since the family moved to Canada two years ago.

In interviews after the deaths, Shafi and the woman he presented as his only wife, Tooba Mohammed Yhaya, said Rona Mohammed was a cousin.

"For some time, my sister, as well as the Shafi couple's oldest daughter, Zainab, had been receiving death threats for social, cultural and family reasons," Masoomi's email to Kingston Police states.

In an interview through translation, Masoomi, who does not speak English or French, explained that Rona Mohammed has stayed in regular contact with relatives in Europe, and has told them she feared for her life.

"She was really afraid," Masoomi told the Whig-Standard, through her daughter Elaha Masoomi. "There were death threats."

Diba Masoomi said that Rona Mohammed married Shafi in Kabul, Afghanistan. When she could not have children, he took a second wife, a practice that is not uncommon in Afghani culture.

Shafi and his second wife had seven children.

Masoomi said her sister remained with the family and raised the children, even when they moved to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, 17 years ago.
[...]

In interviews four days after the car was found underwater at Kingston Mills, Mohammed Shafi and Tooba Mohammed Yhaya surmised that the car ended up in the water as the result of a joyride.

They said their eldest daughter, Zainab, had taken the car without permission in the past, even though she did not have a licence. She was trying to learn to drive.
[...]

Yhaya said sometime later, Zainab came to her room and asked for the keys to the family's Nissan so she could get some clothes from the car.

The next morning, when she awoke, the mother said the Nissan was missing along her three daughters and Rona Mohammed. The family could not reach anyone by cellphone. They filed a missing-person report with police and drove on to Montreal, believing the other group had left without them.

Ali Shafi, who was on the trip to Niagara Falls, told the newspaper he could not remember at which motel the family stayed.
[...]

The only turmoil the family displayed, according to Carpanzano (a neighbor), occurred about a month before the deaths at Kingston Mills when the oldest brother told him that his sister, 19-year-old Zainab, had left home suddenly.

"The older brother said, 'We called the police because my sister, she ran away,'" recounted Carpanzano. "From what we heard it seemed she was going out with somebody the parents didn't want and she ran away, defying her parents' authority."
[...]

Kingston Police have described the incident as perplexing from the start, noting that a car would have had to negotiate many obstacles to make it into the water at that spot in Kingston Mills.

There was no damage to any of the lock equipment, tables or other objects around the edge where the car is presumed to have plunged into the water.

The submerged car was first spotted by a lock worker who was preparing to move the first boats through the canal that day just after 8:30 a.m.

The car was resting on its wheels, its front end up against the lock wall, as if the vehicle plunged in backwards.

Police have never released any information about what was learned when autopsies were done on the victims.http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/07/22/10225341-cp.html

Unamused Cat

July 23rd, 2009, 03:10 PM

Pitiful!

Whisper

July 23rd, 2009, 03:19 PM

When this first happened we all believed the story the dad spewed out.But after rereading everything lastnight dad was setting up the story the daughter took the car on her own when he was sleeping.Then he said she came and asked for keys to car to get clothes and took off.Either way,how many arabic women/girls are going to go against dad???None they raised very subservient.Turns out hes been married to the aunt"30" yrs but b.c she couldnt have kids he married this last one.And where they dumped the car a car cant drive in the way it was found so no clue how they got it in there but the locks have steel gates and walls and a car cant get through so Im curious as to how he got it in there.Thats what tipped off the whole story was the way the car was found

Whisper

July 23rd, 2009, 03:20 PM

KINGSTON, Ont. —
A man, his wife and their son are charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of three Montreal sisters and their caregiver, who were found dead in a submerged car near Kingston.

The bodies of the three teenaged sisters and the 50-year-old woman were found in the car in the Rideau Canal on June 30.

Kingston police Chief Stephen Tanner told a news conference this afternoon he was saddened at the “needless and senseless loss of innocent human lives,” in what he described as a case of domestic violence.

The girls’ father, Mohammed Shafi, had told police the deaths occurred as the family was headed home after vacationing in Niagara Falls and had stopped for the night at a Kingston hotel.

He said the family was traveling in two cars and that he awoke to find one car missing. He reported the car missing to police and said

his eldest daughter was known to take the family car without permission or a licence.

Police said their investigation proved that allegation to be false, and that in fact all three accused had operated the vehicle that wound up in the canal.

The three accused have also been charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Police identified for the first time that the caregiver was in fact Shafi’s first wife. Shafi had told police she was his cousin.

Police held a moment of silence for the victims at the beginning of the news conference.

“All shared the rights within our great country to live without fear, to enjoy safety and freedom ... and yet had their lives cut short by members of their own family,” said Tanner, before asking for the silent tribute to the four female victims.

The accused are Mohammed Shafi, his wife Touba Yahya Shafi and his 18-year-old son Hamed Shafi.

The victims are Zainab Shafi, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammed.

The family, originally from Kabul, Afghanistan, spent 15 years in Dubai before moving to Montreal two years ago.

In the immediate aftermath of the drownings, the surviving Shafis had grieved their loss openly and shared family photographs with the reporters they allowed into their home.

Both parents described the eldest, 19-year-old Zainab, as a rebellious young woman.

The family filed a missing-persons report with police, saying they couldn’t reach the missing family members by cellphone. The remaining Shafis then drove on to Montreal, saying they believed the other group had left without them in the second car.

Kingston police were baffled by how the submerged car left the roadway and ended up under about three metres of water in the Kingston Mills lock.

There were no skid marks and there were several obstacles that would have made it difficult for the car to fall into the canal.

Police said they weren’t certain who was in the driver’s seat but confirmed that all four females were still in the car when it was recovered.

The Nissan was first noticed by a lock worker early morning June 30. It had its front end up against the lock wall as if the vehicle had plunged in backwards.

Autopsy results have not been made public so far.
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/07/23/10236951.html

HijabiGirl

July 23rd, 2009, 03:50 PM

Whisper

July 23rd, 2009, 04:19 PM

TY for saying exactly what I said in a pm to someone.I didnt want to get anyone on me but I agree lets stone them!this update is 10 minutes old,,,,,,Parents, brother charged in Kingston canal deaths

A Montreal family has been charged in the deaths of their three teenage daughters and a 50-year-old caregiver, more than three weeks after police pulled four bodies from a car submerged near Kingston, Ont.According to Kingston police Chief Stephen Tanner, the deaths are a "needless and senseless loss of innocent human lives" which could be an extreme case of domestic violence.

The girls' father, mother and brother all face four counts of first-degree murder each. The four bodies were discovered on June 30 in the Rideau Canal.

The victims are 19-year-old Zainab Shafi and her sisters Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13. The fourth victim is Rona Amir Mohammed, who was revealed to be Shafi's first wife. She was previously described as a cousin.

Police allege that the parents and their son all operated the car which was dumped in the canal, and that the father lied when he told police the deaths occurred by accident during a family vacation.

Three weeks ago, the girls' father Mohammed Shafi told police that the family was driving home from a vacation in Niagara Falls in two cars.

But after the family had stopped in Kingston for a night, the car carrying the girls went missing, Shafi said at the time.

Shafi reported the car missing to police and said that the eldest girl had been known to take the care out without permission.

Autopsy results haven't been released.

The family is originally from Afghanistan but moved to Canada after spending 15 years in Dubai. Police say the family's culture may have contributed to the deaths.

"All shared the rights within our great country to live without fear, to enjoy safety and freedom ... and yet had their lives cut short by members of their own family," said Tanner.

He also asked for a moment of silence for the victims.

Mohammed Shafi, wife Touba Yahya Shafi and their son Hamed Shafi, 18, all face four counts each of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Early on, the deaths appeared to puzzle investigators as they pieced together how the Nissan had plunged into the water. There was speculation that the deaths were the result of careless driving or had occurred after the car's driver lost control.

However, there were several barriers between the roadway and the water, and police couldn't find significant tire marks which would have been consistent with a case of reckless driving.

After the car was discovered, the remaining family members shared their grief with the media and openly discussed their loss.
http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/abc/home/contentposting.aspx?isfa=1&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20090723%2fkingston_canal_090 723

Whisper

July 23rd, 2009, 04:26 PM

However, there were several barriers between the roadway and the water, and police couldn't find significant tire marks which would have been consistent with a case of reckless driving.Thats what I want to know is how they got the car into that water in the position it was in b/c the locks have steel gates and walls in and out of water so Im lost as to how they did it,

Whisper

July 23rd, 2009, 04:31 PM

Sidenote: Afghanis are not Arab. These folks are most likely Pataani and they are reknown for their tribal/backwards ways. Incidently they are also famous for their wonderful treatment of guests....weird, huh?

I hope this man is comfortable with the fact that the Qu'ran states any man who kills his children will burn for all eternity in hell. I don't have an issue with polygyny, it's allowed in Islam with some very strict guidelines. (which are rarely followed by polygynist men) But if they are all consenting adults then who am I to tell them no? I find it strange that a man sleep with innumerable women and even make children with them but the moment he wants to marry more than one and support them he is a criminal. But I digress.

This guy should be punished according to the Shariah law, stone him to death...or beheading..I am flexible. :crazy: Too bad Canada doesn't have a death penalty.
Your right and I didnt even think of that b/c when I do the Canadian Census I have 5 houses over from meand I had a hardtime explaining to them that we dont need the Tribal Name.Up until that first time I did I didnt realize they have Tribal Names!!Learn something new all the time.But they insisited it be included in the census so I did while I was there then removed it once I was at home doing the papers b/c the gov didnt want the Tribal Names included.

Pete Bondurant

July 23rd, 2009, 04:46 PM

Sidenote: Afghanis are not Arab. These folks are most likely Pataani and they are reknown for their tribal/backwards ways. Incidently they are also famous for their wonderful treatment of guests....weird, huh?

I hope this man is comfortable with the fact that the Qu'ran states any man who kills his children will burn for all eternity in hell. I don't have an issue with polygyny, it's allowed in Islam with some very strict guidelines. (which are rarely followed by polygynist men) But if they are all consenting adults then who am I to tell them no? I find it strange that a man sleep with innumerable women and even make children with them but the moment he wants to marry more than one and support them he is a criminal. But I digress.

This guy should be punished according to the Shariah law, stone him to death...or beheading..I am flexible. :crazy: Too bad Canada doesn't have a death penalty.

Honour killings occur not only amongst "backwards" Paatani peoples, but in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc... This practise cannot be confined to a peripheral group within the greater Muslim population. It is a practise that is not unknown even among the Muslim population in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. To place the blame for this sickening culture on a small group is disingenuous.

HijabiGirl

July 23rd, 2009, 05:21 PM

Honour killings occur not only amongst "backwards" Paatani peoples, but in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc... This practise cannot be confined to a peripheral group within the greater Muslim population. It is a practise that is not unknown even among the Muslim population in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. To place the blame for this sickening culture on a small group is disingenuous.

I wasn't stating that they (Pataanis) hold the corner market on Honor killings. Basically honor killings have existed in the Middle East and Asia long before Christianity and Islam were religions in those areas. It is their backwards cultures that encourage this crap, not the religion. People try to use religion as a backdrop for these killings when in fact it was an ingrained part of the culture before any of those religons came into the area.

As a matter of fact Islam strictly forbids "honor killings" but that doesn't stop the idiots from practicing it. I believe Christianity forbids murder...yet look at all these gleaming examples of Christianity shown on this very board. Most of these My Spaces of murderers have "Christian" as religion...yet no one says it was their religious beliefs that made them chose to kill.

Pete Bondurant

July 23rd, 2009, 05:33 PM

HijabiGirl

July 23rd, 2009, 07:27 PM

Ignoring the problem within the Islamic population is not going to solve anything. Mainstream Christians in the Western World...and atheists, agnostics and Jews....do not do this sort of thing. They do not make excuses for this sort of thing.

Also...why is there no outrage in the Islamic community over the Chinese government's treatment of the Muslim Uyghur community? Muslims were outraged, and committed acts of violence over a Danish cartoonist's depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, but I have yet there is almost complete silence in regards to the Uyghur issue. Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt...etc....have buried their collective heads in the sand. Only the secular Turkish government issued words of condemnation. It seems that the Islamic people do not seem to care if it is a non-white government that maltreats Muslims.

I am a member of two Muslim boards and there is constant discussion and movement to have the plight of the Muslims in China highlighted. The board is mostly UK members but they've been appealing to their government to apply pressure to China about it's acts against humanmity. Here in the states the mosques have been gathering information and appealing to the media as well as government to DO something.

There is a large outcry from Muslims in the West and East alike but the media seems only interested in portraying some half literates screaming jihad (and they don't even know the true meaning of jihad) and setting buildings on fire. If you are waiting for true unbiased news reporting (showing the good and bad of a people) then you will die an unfulfilled man.

Whisper

July 24th, 2009, 12:48 AM

Four women gone forever: Kingston canal car deaths timelinePosted: July 23, 2009, 7:50

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

Mohammad Shafia, 56, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 39, and their eldest son Hamed Shafia, 18, all face first-degree murder charges in the deaths which came to light after a Nissan Sentra was discovered in the canal near the Kingston Mills Locks. Conspiracy charges filed at the Kingston courthouse Thursday reveal investigators believe plans to commit the murders were hatched as far back as May 1.

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

June 30 The Shafia family, from Montreal, returns home from a trip to Niagara Falls when they decide to stop for the night in a Kingston, Ont., motel in the early hours. They were travelling in two vehicles, and say they slept in two hotel rooms.

June 30 The family alleges that at about 1:30 a.m. ET 19-year-old Zainab Shafia asked her parents for the keys to the family’s Nissan Sentra. (The family later say Zainab often took the car without consent, but police believe that to be untrue.)

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

June 30, 9:30 a.m. ET A black 2004 Nissan Sentra was discovered underwater in front of the north most lock wall at the Kingston Mills locks. The Nissan was resting on its wheels under water, its front end up against the lock wall. The bodies of four women, Zainab Shafia, her sisters Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and their father’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were discovered inside the vehicle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 23 Police say they have charged Mr. Shafia, Ms. Yhaya and their son Hamid Mohammad Shafia with four counts each of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Police said they have been able to “link” the Lexus SUV and the three accused to the locks. They believe that on the night in question, it was the three accused who “operated” the Nissan. http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2009/07/23/four-women-gone-forever-kingston-canal-car-deaths-timeline.aspx

Whisper

July 24th, 2009, 01:03 AM

Canada faces prospect of dealing with more 'honour killing' cases: expertJuly, 23, 2009 - 08:05MONTREAL
A psychiatry professor at Newfoundland's Memorial University who has studied so-called honour killings said he is working with Justice Canada to define the term in the hopes that it will be included in the Criminal Code.

"The legal system in Canada was not familiar up to now about the context of honour killing and now cases are coming up," said Dr. Amin Muhammad, who estimated it has surfaced in about a dozen cases in Canada.

Muhammad says it is becoming more common as people from countries where such acts persist immigrate to Canada.
He's currently working with Justice Canada to properly define "honour killing," the premeditated murder of a female relative believed to have brought dishonour upon her family, typically by engaging in pre-or extra-marital relations.

The term came up Thursday in the case of the deaths of three Montreal sisters and a caregiver who were found in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal. Police allege the four had been murdered by the girls' parents and brother in a possible "honour killing."

The accused father in the case, Mohammed Shafi, had told police the deaths occurred as the family was headed home after vacationing in Niagara Falls and had stopped for the night at a Kingston hotel. He said the family was travelling in two cars and that he awoke to find one car missing.

Noting the so-called honour killings are not condoned by Islam and are illegal in many countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan even if perpetrators are not always prosecuted for such crimes, Muhammad said many try to use their religion and culture to defend their actions.
"
They try to use the Canadian government's leniency towards respect for different cultures," he said, noting cases often get bogged down in the courts.On Thursday, police in Kingston, Ont., charged Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their 18-year-old son Hamed Mohammad-Shafia with four counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Earlier this month, the bodies of their daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were found dead in the family car which had somehow been submerged in the Rideau Canal near Kingston.

Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, was also dead inside the vehicle. She was initially believed to be a cousin but police now say she was actually Mohammad Shafia's first wife.

While police alluded to differences in cultural values, they would not disclose a possible motive for the killings, but indicated they were investigating allegations from a family member that it might be an "honour crime."

The allegations against Shafia, his wife and son have not yet been proven in court.

The family spent 15 years in Dubai before moving to Montreal two years ago.

In May, an Ottawa jury convicted Hasibullah Sadiqi, 23, of two counts of first-degree murder. Born to Afghan parents, the Indian native gunned down his 20-year-old sister Khatera and her fiancee Feroz Mangal, 23, in 2006.

The so-called honour killing was an attempt to restore his family's status after the couple moved in together before their wedding.

Jamal Kakar, executive director of the Afghan Association of Ontario, said arrests in the Shafia case have "shocked" Canada's approximately 120,000 strong Afghan community.

"It's really unbelievable to me," he said Thursday, noting colleagues are "very disappointed and very saddened" by what's happened.

He said culture shock is a very real problem for new immigrants and that it's not altogether uncommon for situations to become violent.
Organizations like his assist families with the transition, provide mediation and help newcomers understand the rules of their adopted country. He's calling on the government to invest more into services and resources for new immigrants so that things like honour killings won't happen.

"
Every immigrant community needs services to prevent these types of incidents," he said.

According to the United Nations, as many as 5,000 girls and women are murdered every year around the world as part of so-called honour killings.He's currently working with Justice Canada to properly define "honour killing," the premeditated murder of a female relative believed to have brought dishonour upon her family, typically by engaging in pre-or extra-marital relations.

The term came up Thursday in the case of the deaths of three Montreal sisters and a caregiver who were found in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal. Police allege the four had been murdered by the girls' parents and brother in a possible "honour killing."

The accused father in the case, Mohammed Shafi, had told police the deaths occurred as the family was headed home after vacationing in Niagara Falls and had stopped for the night at a Kingston hotel. He said the family was travelling in two cars and that he awoke to find one car missing.

Noting the so-called honour killings are not condoned by Islam and are illegal in many countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan even if perpetrators are not always prosecuted for such crimes, Muhammad said many try to use their religion and culture to defend their actions.

"They try to use the Canadian government's leniency towards respect for different cultures," he said, noting cases often get bogged down in the courts.

On Thursday, police in Kingston, Ont., charged Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their 18-year-old son Hamed Mohammad-Shafia with four counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Earlier this month, the bodies of their daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were found dead in the family car which had somehow been submerged in the Rideau Canal near Kingston.

Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, was also dead inside the vehicle. She was initially believed to be a cousin but police now say she was actually Mohammad Shafia's first wife.

While police alluded to differences in cultural values, they would not disclose a possible motive for the killings, but indicated they were investigating allegations from a family member that it might be an "honour crime."

The allegations against Shafia, his wife and son have not yet been proven in court.

The family spent 15 years in Dubai before moving to Montreal two years ago.

In May, an Ottawa jury convicted Hasibullah Sadiqi, 23, of two counts of first-degree murder. Born to Afghan parents, the Indian native gunned down his 20-year-old sister Khatera and her fiancee Feroz Mangal, 23, in 2006.

The so-called honour killing was an attempt to restore his family's status after the couple moved in together before their wedding.

Jamal Kakar, executive director of the Afghan Association of Ontario, said arrests in the Shafia case have "shocked" Canada's approximately 120,000 strong Afghan community.

"It's really unbelievable to me," he said Thursday, noting colleagues are "very disappointed and very saddened" by what's happened.

He said culture shock is a very real problem for new immigrants and that it's not altogether uncommon for situations to become violent.

Organizations like his assist families with the transition, provide mediation and help newcomers understand the rules of their adopted country. He's calling on the government to invest more into services and resources for new immigrants so that things like honour killings won't happen.

"Every immigrant community needs services to prevent these types of incidents," he said.

According to the United Nations, as many as 5,000 girls and women are murdered every year around the world as part of so-called honour killings.[QUOTE]http://www.680news.com/news/national/more.jsp?content=n232816822

Whisper

July 24th, 2009, 01:10 AM

TIMELINE FOR DEATH
What allegedly happened, according to statements from family and police.

June 30

* 1 a. m.: Shafifamily arrives at east-end motel driving a black 2004 Nissan Sentra and a silver Lexus SUV, they say.

* 1:30 a. m. or later: Zainab Shafi, 19, enters her parents' room and asks for keys to Nissan to get clothes out of car.

* 7:30 a. m.: Tooba Mohammed Yhaya and her husband, Mohammed Shafi, awake to find Nissan missing. They go into police headquarters that morning to file a missing person's report before heading back to Montreal.

* 8:30 a. m.: First boats head into locks at Kingston Mills. Parks Canada workers notice oil plume on water and then see a submerged car at the northeast corner of the upper lock gates. A police dive team is called in and the car and bodies are removed in the afternoon.

July 2

* Autopsies performed on the four women found in the car - Zainab, her sisters Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 and their relative Rona Amir Mohammed, 50, described by family as their aunt. Why didnt autopsy show anything relate4d to murder?Unless, they have toxicology back now showing something??

July 3

* Police send two-man survey crew to plot the terrain around the lock station. There are very few hints of a car coming through the area and tire tracks don't appear to be conclusive. Im dying to know how they got that car into the water

July 5

* Shafifamily buries the four dead women at an Islamic cemetery in Laval, Que. Further services are held in the coming days.

July 1 -10

* Kingston Police visit area businesses along Hwy. 15 to check security video and hotel logs.

July 22

* Police arrest three people but remain mum about further details. An afternoon news release announces a 2 p. m. news conference today to announce "a change in the status of this ongoing investigation."
http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1668566

Whisper

July 24th, 2009, 01:42 AM

News organizations also received an email, purportedly from a relative, that alleges Rona -- Shafia's first wife -- feared for her life and was regularly threatened by her husband.

The email also states that Shafia thought Western culture was negatively influencing his family, and alleges that "the daughters were beaten regularly, either by him or his son Hamed, because their behaviour was a disgrace to him in his eyes," The Canadian Press reported. I am in no way trying to be disrespectful but if you dont want anothers countries influences on your family then stay the hell in your country!!Cant have it both ways,you move to a new country you follow the rules and laws of that country.Just as if I was arrested in your country and I commit a crime I expect to face that countries laws.I cant tell you how many times at work I hear "oh my country beautiful,my country no pollution,my country this that or thre other thing,.then if ours is so bad why did you come here??Aside from escaping death or wars etc,etc,thats different.Sorry but its pissing off b./c 2 weeks ago again on Americas Most Wanted they re ran the story of that Iraqi father in New Jersey who took his 2 teen daughters out to a back road and murdered them b/c 1 had been accepted to University and he didnt like the way the girls were becoming American b/c all their friends were and hes still out there so thats 6 females in that short of a time dead for Hinor Killings!!Fucking sickening sorry,

Whisper

July 25th, 2009, 12:15 AM

Parents, son charged in canal deaths

KINGSTON, Ont. --
As soon as Diba Masoomi learned that her sister Rona Amir Mohammed had been found dead with three younger women in a car at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, she believed she knew the motive.
From her home in western France, Masoomi began an e-mail campaign to convince police that her sister’s husband, Mohammed Shafi, had committed mass murder at Kingston Mills, but that it was a “crime of honour.”

Shafi, his wife Tooba and their 18-year-old son Hamed are charged with first-degree murder.

The true motive for the killings may be revealed if the three accused go to trial, but the tragedy has reopened a debate about the clashes that occur – and the violence generated – when people from conservative cultures try to fit into western society with all of its liberal leanings.

The e-mail from Masoomi painted a picture of ongoing physical abuse and control, with Rona fearing for her life.

“It’s not unheard of that women are killed in cold blood for, supposedly, the defence of men’s honour,” said Haideh Moghissi, associate dean of the faculty of arts at York University and an expert on gender relations in Middle Eastern cultures.

“This is a gruesome murder but whether we should call it an honour killing or not, I doubt it.”
Moghissi said that even though most Mideast countries have adopted European-style codes of civil law, Muslim Sharia law tends to guide personal laws and relations, with the women slotted into subservient roles.

“It means that, first of all, if she’s below 18, she needs the permission of the father [to marry],” Moghissi explained. “Once she enters that marriage, she is bound by certain regulations in terms of obedience.”

It appears that two members of the Shafi family circle fell afoul of both requirements.

In her e-mail, Masoomi said that 19-year-old Zainab had been beaten by her father and older brothers, and “had been receiving death threats.” She had carried on a romantic relationship, not approved by her father, with a young Pakistani man in Montreal.

Masoomi's sister, Rona, was seeking a divorce so that she could get on with her life.

“It must be known, in Afghani tradition, only the husbands are allowed to divorce their wives, which Mr. Shaffi [sic] had refused to do for my sister for 20 years, despite the demands of our brothers,” Masoomi wrote.
In both instances, Rona and Zainab were defying the wishes of the family patriarch.

“Defiance is a very important article in the civil code of many Muslim countries,” said Moghissi. “If a woman refuses to respect some of these legal rights of men and perhaps leaves the house without his permission, or if she gets engaged in extramarital relationships, that’s very harshly punishable by law.”

Moghissi said courts in countries such as Afghanistan will never order the woman put to death as punishment.

“
Muslim law doesn’t require punishment. If it is adultery and he kills her, then if he can prove that [it was adultery], the law is quite lenient in the man’s punishment. It is somehow sanctioning the murder.” Click here to watch the video of the press conference
Moghissi, who studied and taught at Queen’s University in Kingston for nine years, is hesitant to frame the murders as being motivated by cultural forces.

“Most women killed, even in Canada, the statistics tell us they are killed by someone they know, if not their husband,” she said. “It is really similar. There is no difference. It is a jealous, authoritarian ignorant man who thinks he owns the woman. If he can’t have the woman, no one else can.”

At yesterday’s press conference, Kingston Police Chief Stephen Tanner spoke of a monument recently unveiled outside the police station remembering women killed in domestic violence in the city. A moment’s silence for the four victims was also observed.

Tanner spoke about young women in Canada having the right to personal freedoms and free speech.

Joanne Young is executive director of Interval House in Kingston, which provides a safe haven for women and children escaping violence. She agreed that the concept of the honour killing can be over-emphasized.

“As soon as we heard about the car being found, and four women in the car, is that this is a domestic violence killing,” she said. “Based on the work we do here … that was suspicious.”
Young said culture can be a contributing factor.
“This is a family that is fairly new to Western culture. In my experience over the years working in shelters (culture) sometimes does precipitate violence. Women come here and see freedom. They speak out. At times it just causes that frustration within the family, as in ‘We’re losing our cultural identity.’”

One of the Shafis’ neighbours in Montreal said that Hamed Mohammed told him that his sister, Zainab, had run away about a month before the deaths and that police were called in to find her.

“Were the right questions asked when the police came?” Young asked. “Kingston police are very good at asking those right questions to determine what this is.

“A 19-year-old leaving home and calling the police in? That sounds very fishy. Police are trained to ask those questions.”

Diba Masoomi’s letter said that Zainab had “started proceedings with social services in Montreal after having been hit severely by her dad and older brothers.”
Young said counsellors at women’s shelters are trained to consider everything according to the woman’s point of view.

“The first thing we do is work on safety planning. We do lethality assessments. We work through the assessment to see how at risk this woman is,” she said.

“No ifs ands or buts about it. Any violence toward women and children is criminal, period.”

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/07/22/10225341-cp.html

Whisper

July 25th, 2009, 12:23 AM

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Maps/RideauCanalDeaths/home.php this is where they found the car,,

Whisper

July 25th, 2009, 12:49 AM

This is latest and its diff relatives even some defending them for the honor killings!!Family conflict led to canal tragedy, says relative24/07/2009 11:08:53 PM

The eldest of three sisters found dead in a submerged car last month was in a forbidden relationship with a young man before her death, according to a relative, who says the 19-year-old girl had clashed with her family earlier this year. News Staff

Zainab Shafia's body was discovered with those of two younger sisters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, on June 30. Also found dead in a submerged car in the Rideau Canal was Rona Amir Mohammad, a 50-year-old woman now identified as their father's first wife.

Father Mohammed Shafi, wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed Mohammad Shafia, 18, have been charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the deaths.

Kingston police are investigating the possibility that the three girls and the woman were victims of a so-called "honour killing."

Rona's brother says that the family was locked in conflict and that the eldest daughter's romantic relationship with a young Pakistani man may have been a contributing factor in the tragedy.

"The parents of this girl did not want her to marry a Pakistani boy who didn't have any money. They didn't want that," relative Wali Abdali, who lives in France, told CTV Montreal on Friday.

Rona, who had previously been identified by the family as both an aunt and a cousin, lived with her husband, his second wife and their seven children at the family's Montreal home.

But the family arrangement was causing strain, according to Abdali.

"They didn't have a good relationship. The other woman didn't want my sister to stay in the house with them," he said in French.

The father reportedly took a second wife after it was found that Rona couldn't conceive. The marriages took place in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where it is legal to have two wives.

According to Zarmina Fazel, who is the aunt of wife Tooba, Shafia is a smart businessman who has worked hard to build a life for his family in Canada.

Shafia owns at least three business, and last year, he bought a retail mall in Laval, Que., which is worth around $2 million, CTV Montreal reported.

Shafia was also building a large family home in a gated community in Brossard, a suburb east of Montreal.

Originally from Afghanistan, the family lived in Dubai for 15-years before coming to Canada two years ago.

Community reaction

Another relative defended her family members, in an interview with the Toronto Star.

But Zarmina Fazel, the aunt of the girls' mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, has alleged that the four victims died as part of a suicide bid by the eldest daughter, Zainab.

"Zainab was not normal," Fazel said. She defended both parents, saying that father Mohammed is "a very honest man" and that the teens' mother was "not that kind of person."

The three accused are being held in police custody until their next court appearance on Aug. 6.

The whole family was on the way back to their home near Montreal, in Saint-Leonard, Que., around the time the submerged car was discovered. They had been returning from a trip to Niagara Falls.

As rumours surrounding the deaths continue to circulate, Ihsaan Gardee, spokesman from the Canadian chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the term "honour killing" is troublesome.

"With regards to the term honour killing thrown about, all Canadians soundly reject killing, by whatever name -- a killing is a killing," he said.

The term has been used to describe other high-profile cases in Canada, including the 2007 death of Toronto teenager Aqsa Parvez, who was allegedly killed by her father and brother after she refused to wear the traditional Muslim headscarf.

But Gardee said using the phrase sends the message that "the killing of women and children is the exclusive monopoly of any one faith or culture or ethnicity."
http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/abc/home/contentposting.aspx?isfa=1&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20090724%2fsubmerged_folo_090 724

Dakota Valkyrie

July 29th, 2009, 07:50 AM

http://i31.tinypic.com/2qx2war.jpg
A Montreal mother, father and son accused of murdering four family members were attacked and subjected to death threats within hours of arriving at a detention centre in Napanee, Sun Media has learned.

Hamed Shafia, 18, was assaulted by other inmates at the Quinte Detention Centre when he was allowed out of his cell for yard time.

Jail staff had allowed him to exercise with other protective prisoners who were thought to be compatible.

He was not seriously hurt and did not require hospitalization.
[...]

Hamed Shafia's father, Mohammed, was not attacked.

Tooba Mohammed Yahya, who is being held in the separate women's section at Quinte, has not been attacked.

"It's just a matter of time," a prison source said.

Other inmates have been screaming threats and calling Yahya "baby killer." She is permitted daily exercise by herself.

The two Shafia men were being held in an eight-cell wing of the maximum-security section known as unit 1B. They have now been moved to the jail's segregation unit, or hole, where they are isolated from other inmates, held in single cells.
[...]

"At this point, the detention centre is supposed to put them under protection ... how they intend to do it I do not know," Dube said, in an interview yesterday.

Because Quinte is so overcrowded, some protective custody inmates -- those who must be isolated from others -- are double or triple bunked.

Sex offenders, child killers and some other high-profile inmates are despised by the general population and could be killed if not kept isolated.

Quinte does not have a protective custody unit for women. In some cases, women who require segregation are moved into the men's section of the facility, a practice that creates new logistical security problems.

Montreal lawyer Waice Ferdoussi, who represents Mohammed Shafia, ... accused Kingston Police of whipping up anger at the three accused.
[...]http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/07/29/10295936-sun.html

Whisper

July 29th, 2009, 12:13 PM

There was a march downtown the other day to with this b/c they dont want Canadians to think this is the norm b/c its not they said.I think no matter what the belief system is in any country people are pissed.Canada is holding referendums and meetings and planning on talking at school here(in Windsor I know they are) b/c theres a huge muslim,arabic,pakastani etc population here.And they want to get the info out there to the girls in the schools that they can go to a teacher/councellor and let someone know whats going on.Like I said before this makes 5 teens in a little over a month plus that woman thought to be the aunt that was really the first wife.So its getting some attention here and Im sure it will get more as the charges and trials begin to move forward.

Whisper

July 30th, 2009, 05:55 PM

Lawyers seek better protection for alleged canal murder conspiratorsJuly 30, 2009
Lawyers representing Mohammad Shafia and his son, Hamed, accused of killing four of their relatives in Kingston, Ont., have asked that their clients be placed in more secure facilities after inmates at a detention centre allegedly assaulted one and tried to attack the other.

Lawyer Jean Claude Dube, a Montreal lawyer representing Hamed Shafia on murder and conspiracy charges filed last week in Kingston, said he and fellow lawyer Waice Ferdoussi, have made written requests that their clients be better protected while in custody.

Dube said Hamed Shafia was assaulted by inmates at the Quinte Detention Centre during the weekend. Dube said he hasn't spoken to his client since the assault, but was told inmates tried to assault Mohammad Shafia, 56, as well.
received information that several inmates tried to do them harm. They injured (Hamed Shafia), but his father was not injured.

"The son was taken to a hospital, but was returned to the detention centre shortly after," Dube said.

Hamed Shafia filed a complaint after the assault which has since been passed on to a local police force for investigation.

He was arrested last week along with his father and mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya.

All three have been charged in Kingston with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to commit murder. The bodies of Yahya and Mohammad's daughters -- Zainab, 19, Sahari, 17, and Geeti, 13 -- and Mohammad's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, were found in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30.http://www2.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=2b75f877-f3f3-46e0-a813-9ee30b51c8d8 BOO FUCKING HOO They deserve as much protection as they showed their daughters,sisters,aunt,first wife whatever!!Always the way they commit the crime and yet they are the biggest fucking whiners in the world.

Whisper

July 31st, 2009, 07:27 PM

Canal death suspects share cell July 31, 2009
Mohammad Shafia and his son, Hamed, accused of murder in the canal deaths in Kingston, are now sharing a cell in protective custody, LCN reports.

Prison authorities decided Tuesday to place the two accused in the same cell in the isolation unit at the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, Ont., to protect them from other prisoners, the French-language TV network reports.

Mohammad Shafia, Hamed and his mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, have all been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to commit murder.
The bodies of Yahya and Mohammad's daughters -- Zainab, 19, Sahari, 17, and Geeti, 13 -- and Mohammad's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, were found in a car submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30.

http://www2.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=f3bbe6c5-93b6-4b75-9e69-b326788d2a1e

Whisper

August 2nd, 2009, 02:23 PM

August 1 2009Slain Montreal teen tried to marry, says `groom'.MONTREAL -
The eldest of three teenagers found dead in a submerged car in Kingston, Ont., in June, made as many as three attempts to get married before she, her two sisters, and another relative were killed, allegedly at the hands of her parents and brother.

In an interview with Canwest News Service, a 26-year-old Montreal man said he and Zainab Shafia were married in a religious ceremony at a suburban Montreal mosque in May. The wedding was never officially registered with the province of Quebec because both his and his bride's families disapproved of the union.

The couple decided not to register the wedding the day after it took place, he said adding he believes Zainab was engaged to another man at some point last year.

According to Sun Media, Zainab, 19, was about to announce her engagement to another man, a 27-year-old Montrealer, on July 1. She was found dead inside a car discovered submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30. The bodies of her two younger sisters - Sahari, 17 and Geeti, 13, also were found inside the car along with the body of Rona Amir Mohammad, Mohammad Shafia's first wife.

Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed Shafia each face four counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy.

A relative of the 27-year-old Montrealer declined to be interviewed by Canwest News Service last week. He said he would have something to say after the trial is over.

Relatives of Rona Amir Mohammad have alleged that her husband felt his oldest daughter had disgraced his family by her behaviour in Canada. They also alleged the homicides were carried out as so-called honour killings. The family, originally from Kabul, moved to Montreal from Dubai two years ago.http://www.canada.com/Slain+Montreal+teen+tried+marry+says+groom/1852893/story.html?id=1852893

Whisper

August 6th, 2009, 09:12 PM

Parents, son, don't enter pleas in canal deaths
A
Montreal couple and their son did not enter pleas as they made separate video appearances in a Kingston, Ont. court on first-degree murder charges.
Mohammed Shafi, his wife Touba Yahya Shafi and his son Hamed Shafi, 18, have also been charged with conspiracy to commit murders.

They were charged after the deaths of three of their daughters and a female relative, who were found dead in a submerged car.

The bodies of 19-year-old Zainab Shafi, along with her sisters, 17-year-old Sahar and 13-year-old Geeti, were found June 30 in a Nissan Sentra that was submerged in the Rideau Canal.

Rona Amir Mohammed, described by police as a 50-year-old relative, was also inside the same car.

The accused family members have hired new Kingston-area lawyers.

The new lawyers say they have received no discourse of evidence from the police and are expecting some information by Aug. 12.

The accused are due back in court on Aug. 14.

The court has authorized the couple's other children to make unsupervised visits at the detention centres they are being held in.

Following the discovery of the bodies at the end of June, Mohammed Shafi claimed his daughters and first wife -- the 50-year-old woman found in the car -- died after the family was making its way back to Montreal after a trip to Niagara Falls.

The family had stopped for the night at a Kingston hotel and Mohammed Shafi said that he woke up and found one of his cars missing. He claimed his eldest daughter, Zainab, was prone to taking the car out on the road without his permission.

But more than three weeks after the bodies of the four women were found in the car, police charged Mohammed Shafi, as well as his wife and son, with the killings.

Police allege that the three accused operated the car that was found in the canal with the four bodies inside.

Rob Tripp, an investigative reporter with the Kingston Whig-Standard, said that relatives of the accused contacted police to relay their suspicions that the four women had not died as a result of an accident.

"We've got four relatives, in this case, of one of the victims who all live in Europe," he told CTV's Canada AM during a phone interview from Kingston on Thursday morning.

"Within days of this event, of the four women being pulled out of the canal, these relatives were calling and e-mailing the police in Kingston, alleging that this could not be an accident. They believed it was an honour killing orchestrated by the patriarch, the father in this family, along with his wife and his oldest son, to restore his honour because of apparent offences to his honour by his daughter and his first wife."

Another relative, however, has denied that the four women died as a result of an honour killing.

In a recent interview with the Toronto Star, Zarmina Fazel has alleged that the victims died as part of a suicide bid by the eldest daughter, Zainab Shafi.

"Zainab was not normal," Fazel said. She defended both parents, saying that father Mohammed is "a very honest man" and that the teens' mother was "not that kind of person."

The Shafi family is originally from Afghanistan, but lived in Dubai for about 15 years before moving to Canada in recent years.

Mohammed Shafi had a successful business selling Japanese cars in Dubai, and last year purchased a shopping mall in Laval, Que., for more than $1 million.

http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/Home/ContentPosting?newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20090806%2fcou rt_shafi_090806&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True

MC30

August 6th, 2009, 09:24 PM

honour schmour...how about calling it ' i'm a man and your a woman and you pissed me off now your dead' killing....oh wait, we have that in the USA..its called MURDER!

Whisper

June 19th, 2010, 01:27 PM

Here is the outcome to one of the "Honor Killings" I listed above
Father, son given life for teen's honour killing
More than two years after her death, Aqsa Parvez received justice Wednesday, the Crown says -- an ideal the 16-year-old fought for even as her father and brother conspired to strangle her inside the family home.

In a scathing ruling that decried their "twisted, chilling and repugnant mindset," Justice Bruce Durno sentenced Muhammad and Waqas Parvez to life in prison with no chance of parole for 18 years.

"Aqsa finally got in death what she didn't get in life in terms of justice and dignity," Crown attorney Mara Basso said outside court, noting the stiff sentence "sends an incredibly important and necessary message to our community."

Muhammad and Waqas Parvez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Aqsa's 2007 slaying this week. As Durno issued the final word Wednesday, the pair sat expressionless in the prisoners' box as family members looked on; Aqsa's mother, Anwar Jan, occasionally dabbed her eyes.
The Crown has characterized Aqsa's murder as an honour killing, and while the defence has shied away from that label, Durno appeared to accept that notions of honour played a role in the tragedy.
[...]
The youngest of eight children, Aqsa Parvez was 16 years old when her father and brother strangled her to death. An agreed statement of facts details a clash of cultures, pitting Aqsa against her father's oppressive, patriarchal rule.
Originally from Pakistan, Aqsa became increasingly enmeshed in western culture after the family relocated to Mississauga, Ont., in 2001, setting the stage for increased tensions at home.

Women in the Parvez family were expected to dress traditionally, to rely on men for financial stability, and to spend most of their free time confined to the household. Arranged to be married to a Pakistani man, Aqsa longed for the freedom to dress as she wished and spend evenings with her friends; she craved privacy, as her bedroom had no door.

In late November 2007, Aqsa decided she had had enough, and elected to leave home.

"She confided in her closest friends that her father had sworn to her on the Qur'an that if she ran away again, he would kill her," Crown attorney Sandra Caponecchia told the court this week.
Days before she died, Aqsa enjoyed a movie for the first time, and had started to take steps toward a part-time job. But on Dec. 10, 2007, her brother picked her up from the bus stop as she waited there with a friend.

Half an hour later, Aqsa's father called police to say he had killed Aqsa with his bare hands. He was charged in her murder the same day.

Almost more chilling than the crime itself was the family's willingness to defend it in statements to police.
The teenager's siblings agreed Aqsa deserved violent retribution for her disobedience; Aqsa's mother, Jan, suggested it was acceptable in Pakistan to kill children for such behaviour.http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Father+given+life+teen+honour+killing/3163826/story.html

brokenandtwisted

June 19th, 2010, 02:41 PM

18 years without parole is suitable, I feel.

Whisper

October 13th, 2011, 12:18 PM

Canal murder trial jury selection underway

KINGSTON, Ont. — Three Montreal residents accused in the killings of four family members who were found in a car at the Kingston Mills locks in 2009 pleaded not guilty Tuesday as an extensive jury-selection process began.

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

On June 30, 2009, Rideau Canal staff discovered a car submerged at the upper lock gates at Kingston Mills with four bodies inside, later identified as the Shafias’ daughters — Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 — as well as Mohammad Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50.

The trial could run eight to 12 weeks and there are 57 names on the list of potential witnesses.

The main courtroom in the historic Frontenac County Court House has been retrofitted with the latest technology to allow simultaneous translation of the proceedings from English to Farsi for the elder Shafias, who are from Afghanistan.

Translation will also be provided in French and Spanish
Seven days have been set aside for jury selection, with more than 1,000 people on call as potential jurors.

On Tuesday, eight were chosen from more than 90 people who were presented. Twelve jurors plus two designates need to be selected in total.

A number of the potential jurors were dismissed by presiding Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger for health reasons, because they had made previous travel plans or if they would experience economic hardship for being away from their work.

Others said they were hard of hearing and would have difficulty following the proceedings.

Several had child-care issues
[....].

They were also asked if they would have any biases because the accused come from Afghanistan and are Muslim.

The trial is officially set to start on Oct. 20 but could begin earlier if jury selection moves along more quickly than expected.

The selection was scheduled to continue Wednesday at 10 a.m.

The judge also announced he was boosting the pay for the trial.

Normally, jurors are not paid for the first 10 days of trial, receive $40 for each of the next 39 days and get $100 a day thereafter.

Maranger said because the trial was expected to run for such a long time, they would receive $40 a day immediately and then $100 starting on the 25th day.
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2011/10/12/18813751.html

Tundratot

October 13th, 2011, 01:39 PM

VXIII

October 13th, 2011, 05:35 PM

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/shafia.jpghttp://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/rona.jpg

I was unable to find anymore info on this other than what we have here, I did find an older picture of Rona and the 3 girls, guess all my questions will be answered during the trial...

Whisper

October 13th, 2011, 07:00 PM

We've heard about why they probably killed the first wife/cousin, and the eldest daughter, but not why they included the other younger daughters. I can only surmise they were sympathetic to their more rebellious female family members.

The concept of honor killing baffles me. I guess because they choose to call it "honor" and not "female sin". A guy can rape a woman, steal her from her family, rob a store, fornicate outside of marriage, kill someone, stray from the Koran, drink alcohol, and none of that is scar on the family honor? Hell, we even hear about men marrying the woman their father disapproves of, they still don't get killed for their disobedience. It seems that the "love" these parents feel for their daughters is pretty shallow, if not non-existent.

Also just have to interject here that the first wife probably was also a cousin. In many Middle Eastern cultures, the cousin marriage is considered the most desirable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

In the paper lastnight it said they included the girls b/c they were all becoming "to westernized"
Heres a diff one,Ill post more later or in morning when I find that one again

Family murder trial begins in Kingston

Crown attorneys and defence lawyers on Tuesday began interviewing jurors for the largest mass-killing trial in the long history of Kingston, Ont.
In all, 1,050 residents have been summoned and will be interviewed over seven days to determine the 12 jurors and three alternatives in the trial of a father, mother and brother accused of killing four family members.
[....]
The gruesome discovery set off a massive police investigation that has gone around the world. Witnesses in the trial are expected to come from as far away as France.
The discovery also piqued the curiosity of locals, many of whom visited the site of the locks in the ensuing days to wonder aloud about how the car made it into the water and settled directly in front of the locks, without a trace.
Weeks after the discovery, police in Kingston arrested Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son Hamed, 21, and charged them in the ki+lling of the couple's three daughters - Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 - and Rona Amir Mohammad, who was Mohammad Shafia's first wife. The mother, father and son were arrested in Montreal in July 2009.
The three accused each face four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy.
Relatives of Rona Amir Mohammad contend the deaths were so-called honour killings, or slayings for what is deemed immoral behaviour.
The details of the investigation and evidence before the court is under a sweeping publication ban that will be lifted only after the trial is over.
The family is of Afghan origin but moved to Montreal in 2007.
The Shafias speak Farsi, and a courtroom at the Ontario Court of Justice building in Kingston has been fitted with headsets to provide instant translation in Farsi, English and French.
The trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 20 and is expected to last three months.
http://www.windsorstar.com/news/Family+murder+trial+begins+Kingston/5536222/story.html#ixzz1ahpTdAgO

Whisper

October 17th, 2011, 10:10 PM

Accused father “very anxious” on eve of mass murder trial

http://www.cancrime.com/2011/10/15/accused-father-very-anxious-on-eve-of-mass-murder-trial/

Trial starts Thurs

http://i51.tinypic.com/24mytzk.jpg

Tooba

http://i54.tinypic.com/344ql1j.jpg

Shafia

Whisper

October 20th, 2011, 11:32 PM

Mohammad Shafia trial: Prosectuor outlines Crown case in 'honour killing' trial

KINGSTON, Ontario – With the help of his wife and son, Mohammad Shafia killed his three teenage daughters and his first wife and attempted to conceal the murders by putting their bodies into a car and pushing it into a canal, jurors were told Thursday at the opening of Canada’s first mass honour killing trial.
Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle spent an hour and a half outlining in detail the Crown’s case against the Afghan immigrant and his co-accused, who are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder. The family had been living in Montreal since 2007.
[...]
Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba, 41, and their son Hamed, 20, are accused of murdering Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, who was Shafia’s first wife.
The victims were found dead inside a car that was found submerged in a shallow canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009. Lacelle said autopsies showed the victims drowned and three of them had fresh bruises on their heads. She explained that the three daughters had angered their father by dressing in modern, Western clothes and by pursuing boyfriends. Tooba could be heard sobbing in the prisoner's box as a photo of Geeti was flashed on monitors in the courtroom.

Lacelle told the jurors that police mounted an elaborate, covert investigation that included the wiretapping of a Shafia vehicle. She said Shafia was recorded speaking to Tooba and Hamed, after the deaths but before they were arrested.
“He said, even if they hoist me up onto the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honour,” Lacelle said, recounting Shafia’s words. “Let’s leave our destiny to god and may god never make me, you or your mother honourless.”

Of his dead daughters, Shafia said in another intercepted conversation: “May the devil s--t on their graves.” Lacelle said the jurors will hear evidence about a practice in some cultures in which family honour can be tarnished by sexual misconduct or disobedience of women. In some cases, families believe they can restore their honour by killing the women who have transgressed.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Mohammad+Shafia+trial+Prosectuor+outlines+Crown+ca se+honour+killing+trial/5581237/story.html#ixzz1bNnE3D7j

http://i53.tinypic.com/16ge3d.jpg
Hamed Shafia (from left), Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Mohammad Yahya walk into the Frontenac Court courthouse in Kingston Ont., Oct. 20, 2011. The three are charged with first degree murder of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as that of Rona Amir Mohammad, 50. The bodies were found in Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009.

Whisper

October 20th, 2011, 11:33 PM

Parents despised slain girls for hurting 'honour,' jury hears

Crown prosecutors began framing the deaths of three teenage girls and a relative as an "honour killing" in an Ontario courtroom on Thursday, more than two years after the victims were found submerged in the Rideau Canal near Kingston, Ont.
It's expected that the honour killing narrative will be key to the prosecution's case against the accused family members: Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia.
All three face four counts each of first-degree murder, and all three have pleaded not guilty to those charges.
[...]
Only days later, the girl's father was secretly recorded by police talking about the deaths and linking them to honour, prosecutors said.
Other conversations, secretly recorded by police, reveal that the girls' father felt betrayed because his daughters had boyfriends, Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle said.

[...]
Officers bugged the family's vehicle, and in order to spur conversation, police then told the Shafias that they had found a camera near the scene of the deaths, and that it was being examined.
The Shafias, however, scoffed at the police, and said that they were bluffing.
"If they had had any proof they would have come for us a long time ago," Shafia said.
A separate wire recorded Shafia and his wife talking about their daughters three weeks after the deaths.
"If we remain alive ... we have no tension thinking our daughter is in the arms of this or that boy, this or that man," Shafia said.
"God's curse on them for generations. May the devil (defecate) on their graves. Is that what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore?"
Lacelle continued to quote Shafia: "There can be no treachery, no violation more than this … They committed treason from beginning to end. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam...They betrayed everything."
Along with the tape recorded statements, Lacelle told the jury that she would be calling expert witnesses and presenting evidence on honour killings. In some extreme cases, Lacelle said, killing is used to restore a family's honour.
The Shafia family lived in Montreal before the killings, but originally hail from Afghanistan.
Before the bodies of the three daughters and their elder female relative, who was Shafia's first wife, the family was under stress, court heard.
Their eldest daughter, Zainab, had run away from the family, only to be coaxed home because her mother said she could marry her boyfriend.
But when the groom's family didn't come to the wedding, Zainab was forced to annul the marriage by her parents, court heard.
Sahar, 17, was also seeing a boy and the parents suspected that Geeti, 13, was also getting into a relationship, Lacelle said.
Plus, court heard that the two elder daughters were resisting their father by not wearing the hijab. Geeti, meanwhile, was caught stealing from a store and wasn't doing well in school, Lacelle said.
Court heard that Rona Amir Mohammad was Shafia's first wife, but when it became apparent that she could not bear children, Shafia married Yahya, Lacelle said.
Still, Rona Amir helped bring up the children and loved them like a mother, Lacelle said.
However, she was treated poorly and was beaten by Shafia, according to diary excerpts read in court by Lacelle.http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111020/shafia-montreal-family-murder-trial-kingston-111020/20111020/?hub=MontrealHome
http://i55.tinypic.com/30t75tj.jpg
Mohammad Shafia, right, walks in front of his son Hamed Mohammad Shafia as they are escorted to the courtroom at the Frontenac County Court courthouse on the first day of trial in Kingston, Ontario on Thursday, October 20, 2011.

sheevaa

October 21st, 2011, 12:20 AM

Thanks for covering this so much, whisp. This is disgusting. Killed for trying to live without licking their father's/ex-husbands boot? Fucking sickening.
Do Muslims have a hell? They're heading for it.

HeatherHabilatory

October 21st, 2011, 03:30 AM

Here's a groovy thought:

Don't want your kids to become "westernized," DON'T FUCKING MOVE TO THE WEST!

God damn. People are just stupid.

Whisper

October 22nd, 2011, 01:08 AM

Shafia trial: Cop thought Nissan in canal was prank
October 21, 2011

KINGSTON, Ont. – The first police constable called to the puzzling discovery of a car submerged in a canal with four bodies inside immediately suspected it was not an accident.
Brent White, the second witness at the murder trial of a Montreal businessman, his wife and son, testified he believed the car had been deliberately put there.
“It’s in the locks where it’s obviously going to be found,” testified White, who did not know what the car contained when he began investigating on the morning of June 30, 2009.
[...]
Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba, 41, and their son Hamed, 20, are accused of murdering the four in an honour killing disguised to look like an accident. They have pleaded not guilty.
The family, originally from Afghanistan, came to Canada in 2007 and settled in Montreal. They have said previously they were returning to Montreal from a vacation in Niagara Falls and stopped at a motel in Kingston. Shafia and Tooba told police that Zainab took the Sentra without permission and, with the three passengers, crashed it into the canal.
White was on patrol in a cruiser when Parks Canada staff working at the locks spotted the Sentra in about three metres of water at Kingston Mills. He was dispatched to investigate.
y thinking at the time was, these are kids who just played a prank and it’s a long weekend, ha ha, very funny, they’ve shut down the locks for the long weekend,” White testified.
He said Kingston Police get many reports of stolen cars taken for joyrides and abandoned in water.
White acknowledged making several mistakes that day, in part attributing it to his inability to foresee the gravity of the situation.
He drove his police cruiser onto the grassy property adjacent to the canal. He walked the property looking for evidence that might suggest the car’s path to the water and found two pieces of triangular-shaped, clear plastic. He picked them up and put them back down in the same spot, believing they were unimportant.
“Hindsight’s 20-20,” he told jurors, acknowledging he “would have never touched them” had he realized their significance.
The pieces were later matched by forensic testing to a silver Lexus owned by the Shafia family, along with other similar chunks found in the area.
The pieces are crucial to the prosecution theory that the Lexus was used to push the Sentra into the canal when it became wedged on the stone lip at the water’s edge. In the process, the front driver-side headlight and bumper of the Lexus was damaged and pieces broke off.
Under cross examination by a defence lawyer, White acknowledged three errors involving distances recorded in his notes and in a statement.
I probably shouldn’t even have put measurements in my notes, but I did, from my recollection,” he testified.
Jurors also got a glimpse of the kind of sparring matches that are likely during the trial.
Kingston police Constable Julia Moore, who photographed and studied the area around the canal, explained where the broken car parts were recovered and where marks were seen on the stone ledge. The findings led police to conclude the Sentra navigated a series of obstacles before it plunged into the water.
Defence lawyer Patrick McCann pointed out, on an aerial photo, what he said are more direct paths to the water for a car. He concentrated on one spot.
Moore said she had not studied the area and had not taken any measurements there.
“That’s a pretty direct route, is it not?” McCann asked.
I can’t agree that anything’s a direct route,” Moore replied.
McCann said it appeared to be a direct path in comparison to the “circuitous route” that the police pinpointed
“I don’t know why you’re bringing that up,” Moore said.
“Well, you don’t need to ask me questions; I’ll ask you questions, if you don’t mind,” McCann retorted.
On the opening day of the trial, prosecutor Laurie Lacelle outlined the Crown’s theory that Mohammad Shafia was angry that his daughters, who were close to his first wife, Rona, were becoming Westernized, wearing revealing clothing and consorting with boys, against his wishes.
Police found a diary in the Shafia home, Lacelle said, in which Rona documented a life of despair and mistreatment by Shafia and Tooba. An English translation of the diary was released Friday.
“He married a second time and I was visited with a new catastrophe,” Rona wrote, according to the translation.
Shafia took a second wife, a practice legal in Afghanistan, because Rona was infertile. In the diary, Rona describes the growing efforts of Tooba to “separate” her from Shafia and cut her out of the family.
“I said … you can’t kick me out, you are one wife of his, I am another,” Rona wrote. “She said, ‘You are not his wife, you are my servant.’ ”
[...]http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Shafia+trial+thought+Nissan+canal+prank/5590021/story.html#ixzz1bU4jUgXr

http://i53.tinypic.com/e5n58x.jpg
Mohammad Shafia Hamed (left), his father Mohammed Shafia (right), and mother Tooba are charged with first-degree murder of daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and first wife Rona Amir Mohammad, 52. The women’s bodies were found in a car submerged under water in Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009.

Whisper

October 22nd, 2011, 01:22 AM

Really good read,its from Ronas(first wife that was murdered )diary she kept
DiManno: A collision of cultures and wives

KINGSTON—One husband, two wives and endless bitter rivalry, the jostling for favour.

Rona Amir Mohammad regularly drew the short straw, despite being Wife No. 1 to Mohammad Shafia. When unable to conceive, she was usurped by Wife No. 2, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, a younger woman of effortless fecundity — seven babies popped at a pace of nearly one per year.

The resentment was palpable and cut both ways.

Shafia and Yahya are accused of murdering Rona and three of their own daughters in what the prosecution asserts was a mass honour killing provoked by outrage over perceived family disgrace, cultural traditions transgressed and entangled loyalties. The couple’s 21-year-old son, Hamed, has also been charged with four counts of first-degree murder in what the Crown describes as a “staged accident.” Their trial began here this week.

The large Montreal clan, originally from Afghanistan but widely travelled as businessman Shafia looked for a promising country to put down roots, was a-roil will domestic tensions, court has heard, the discord aggravated by daughters who dressed in revealing Western clothes, rejected the hijab, took boyfriends and spilled family secrets to the outside world.

But the animus clearly began within the marital ménage à trois, with wives forced to coexist under one roof, Rona’s status concealed by children who called her “auntie’’ in public.

In the year before Rona died — her body, along with those of teenage sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti retrieved June 30, 2009 from a Nissan Sentra submerged in the Kingston Mills locks — she had kept a diary, Rona’s Memoirs. It is a chatty narrative, written by that rare creature: a literate, well-educated Afghan female.

Daughter of a retired army colonel, Rona wrote that “fortunately I came from a liberal-minded family’’ that imposed few restrictions. She was even permitted to watch basketball matches between schools “with no objection from my family.”

She became engaged to Shafia in a typically arranged marriage after his mother invited her over, so that the son “could have a good look at me.” The reception at a Kabul hotel was grand.

But after seven years had passed with no issue, “my life began a downward spiral right up to the today that I am writing these memoirs.”

Shafia, she writes, became hostile and constantly complaining. “Go and take another wife, what can I do?’’ she told him.

And he did, as is common practice in Afghanistan. Enter 17-year-old Tooba.

Then, for page after page in her articulate diary, Rona catalogues her grievances, the major and the picayune. It was she, writes Rona, who willingly and happily looked after the babies that Tooba presented to Shafia — five daughters and two sons — creating a special bond with Sahar, the baby girl Tooba gave Rona to raise as her special own, a most generous gift.

The other gifts the wives shared, however, most especially the jewellery that Shafia bought each, were not so fairly balanced, Rona complains. Indeed, much of the diary that has been entered as an exhibit — Crown attorney Lauren Lacelle read excerpts from it in her opening statement and the jurors have been given a translation of the full text — encompasses an almost ledger-like itemization of what Rona got and what Tooba got, right down to the carat weight of gold in Indian rupees.

“One day Shafie (Shafia) said, ‘I want to buy gold (jewellery) for both you.’ He told me, ‘Choose whether you want (gold) bangles or a set. He asked the same of Tooba. I said I wanted a set because I had bangles. (This was) because I had two sets (of gold) but Shafie (had taken them away from me and) had sold them when we were in India, because, (he said), ‘Tooba keeps telling me, “Rona has a lot of gold and I have little,” so I will sell all your gold and (later) I will buy you both (the same thing and treat you both equally.’’

But she’s miffed that Shafia sold the sets, replacing it with one that did not include a bangle and a ring,” saying “that’s enough for now’’ and more would come later.

“He deceived me. I am in Canada now that I am writing this episode, and a long time has passed since then, but because it pained me a great deal I want to put this episode, this bitter story of my life, on paper.

“Anyway, let me continue the story . . . .’’

What follows is the chronology of a three-way marriage unravelling, but, more intriguingly, a rare glimpse into the intimacies and intricacies of polygamy — the frustration of a first wife eclipsed, nursing grudges over day-to-day clashes, the minutiae of domestic living.

There were daily arguments, silent treatments that extended for months, quarrelling over household tasks; envy of Tooba’s shopping sprees, Tooba being allowed to get a driver’s licence, Tooba’s increasingly high-handed attitude toward her rival. It reads like both women were in a state of suspended adolescence with Tooba, in these pages, the Mean Girl.

Some of the children took their cue from mom. At one point, of the younger daughters demands to know from Rona: “Swear upon my head. Haven’t you slept with my father?’’

This was the culture of which Hamed would later write in a high school composition: “Traditions and customs are to be followed till the end of one’s life . . . tradition and customs of a person is like his identity and what makes him special even though living in another country.’’

When the water-filled Nissan Sentra was winched out of the locks, Rona was floating backwards behind the driver’s seat, her dead body arched.
[...]http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1074041--dimanno-a-collision-of-cultures-and-wives?bn=1

VXIII

October 22nd, 2011, 04:38 AM

I want to read her diary... poor Rona... she must have been so miserable... Here are some clearer pictures of everyone:

Rona: http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/rona2.jpg

Rona's friend told her, “She was not in Afghanistan. She was in Canada, and not to be afraid.”

Her Special gift Sahar : http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/sahar.jpg

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

Beautiful Zainab: http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/zainab.jpg

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

Young Geeti looks very unhappy: http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/geeti.jpg

But it was the little girl, Geeti, who fought her parents most ferociously and who begged most blatantly for help. “She told her school,” Ms. Lacelle said. “She told the police. She told youth protection.”

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

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

The Prosecution has some very damning evidence from the father's own mouth and internet search records done by oldest son:
http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=39261

Tundratot

October 22nd, 2011, 07:12 PM

In another snippet recorded by the device police had placed in a family car, Mr. Shafia told Ms. Yahya, “They committed treason themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion…they betrayed everything.”He's just a good old despot, in point of fact.

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

“I say to myself, ‘You did well.’ Were they to come to life, I would do it again.” . . . That's as good as a direct admission IMO.

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

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

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

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

In the second instance, though police in Montreal interviewed the children separately and had them open up about their maltreatment – including the fact that Mr. Shafia allegedly “often threatened to kill them” – the child protection worker interviewed the girls in the presence of their parents.Just brilliant. That's one way to keep the case load down.

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

The oldest son Hamid was the head of the household when Mr. Shafia was away. He had a driver’s licence and his own cell phone, used his father’s silver Lexus, and helped him in business.Not terribly surprising.

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

It was her running away . . . to a women’s shelter which sparked the family’s downward spiral, Ms. Lacelle told the jurors.Good move running to a shelter. Too bad she went back.

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

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

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

Just weeks before she died, the school vice-principal phoned and told Ms. Yahya why she was being sent home. I guess she had to, but . . . geez.http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=39261

I guess that social services didn't see the cultural differences as threatening to the girls' lives, and all the usual things were being done. They couldn't know that the father and his second wife and son were going to go the extreme of honor killing and probably figured that the girls would be able to get out of the home when they reached their majority. Which Zainab at least tried to do. Somewhere earlier it was reported that the family of her husband didn't approve of the marriage, so she was forced to annul it?

It's terrible that, here in the "free world", we couldn't do better by these women and girls.

Whisper

October 24th, 2011, 07:54 PM

Shafia honour killing trial coverage Oct 24 2011 Kingston Ont.
http://mrctv.org/videos/shafia-honour-killing-trial-coverage-oct-24-2011-kingston-ont

hasnt updated yet in print

Whisper

October 24th, 2011, 11:00 PM

Police diver puzzled by bodies in car, court hears
Oct 24 2011

KINGSTON, Ont. -- A police diver with 24 years experience recovering bodies from sunken vehicles said he was perplexed by what he found at Kingston Mills on June 30, 2009, a multiple murder trial heard Monday.
"Most cases, when you have a window wide open, people are trying to get out," said Ontario Provincial Police Const. Glenn Newell.

"In this case it didn't even seem to be an option."
Newell was testifying at the first-degree murder trial of three Montreal people - Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their son, Hamed.
He had been called to the scene to assist Kingston Police after a black Nissan Sentra had been discovered in about eight feet of water at the top of the locks in Colonel By Lake.

On his first dive, Newell realized there were at least two bodies inside.
When he returned to the car with a video monitor he discovered four bodies, later identified as the Shafias' three daughters - Zainab, Sahar and Geeti - and Mohammad Shafia's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad.

What Newell found most unusual was that "it was difficult to tell which person would have been drving the vehicle.
In 90% of such cases, he said, the driver would be "in the proximity of the driver seat area."

"Both people partially in the front seat, their legs were between the two bucket seats. That didn't make sense," recalled Newell.
"I was quite perplexed by it."
He also noticed that while the car appeared to have gone over the edge of the lock wall in reverse, it was actually in first gear.
Under questioning by Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis, Newell said the car might have taken about one to two minutes to sink.

The open window, he said, "would have made it very simple for anyone to get to the window to get out that window."
Defence lawyer Patrick McCann, representing Hamed Shafia, objected to the Crown's use of Newell as an "expert" witness on how the car would have sunk and how long it would have taken.
Justice Maranger agreed and Laarhuis moved on to present a 14-minute video of Newell's underwater recovery effort.
At that point, however, the proceedings ended abruptly and dramatically for the day when Yahya asked to be released from the courtroom.
She had stood in the prisoners' box to get the the attention of the judge and her lawyer, David Crowe.
Crowe asked Justice Robert Maranger to excuse Yahya because the video would be disturbing for her to watch.

Maranger and Laarhuis agreed she was required not to be present for part of her trial, if she so chose.
The judge then realized it was 4:30 p.m. and decided to hold off presenting the video evidence until today.

Newell was the second diver to testify yesterday.

The jury was also introduced to John Moore, who arrived wearing a Canadian Navy uniform.
Moore, a ship's diver and diving officer for 18 years, was vacationing at Kingston Mills when the car was discovered at the top of the locks.
He was at the bottom lock with his son and a friend trying to get through Kingston Mills when canal staff turned their boat around because the Nissan was obstructing the top gates.

Moore offered to put on his scuba gear and go down to the car, which he did around 10 a.m.
He was the first person to realize there were bodies in the car, prompting Kingston Police officers at the scene to call in the OPP dive unit.
The first body Moore saw was that of a young girl, floating by the open driver's side window with her head wedged up against the post between the front and back doors.
Like Newell, Moore noticed "the driver's side window fully open and she could have gotten out, even if she couldn't swim, and stand on top of the vehicle."

In cross-examination, lawyer Peter Kemp, acting for Mohammad Shafia, suggested to Moore that his observations about someone escaping such a situation were formed by the fact that he was a longtime diver used to being underwater.

"You're an expert diver," said Kemp. "You're trained to do that."
Kemp said the visibility at night would have been limited and the people in the car would have experienced pains in their ears as they sank into the murky water.
McCann continued with the same line of questioning, asking the court to imagine a teenaged girl, "suddenly finding herself in a vehicle in pitch darkness at night."

Newell, who estimated he has recovered between 250 and 300 bodies in his 24 years of OPP diving, described the Kingston Mills recovery effort in some detail.

The first body he took out was a young female seated in the driver's side rear seat who he took out through the back door. That body had previously been identified as Sahar's.

Next out was Rona, seated in the middle of the back seat.
Both bodies in the rear of the car, said Newell, were seated normally with their feet on the floor.

The third body removed, the one closest to the driver's seat window, but not completely in that location, was Geeti, floating with her head facing into the back seat and one arm draped around the headrest.

Before taking her out, Newell had to move aside the body of Zainab, who was floating near the front passenger seat.

The two divers had been preceded yesterday afternoon by the testimony of three Parks Canada employees on duty at the locks at the time - canalmen John Bruce and Bob Martin, and acting lockmaster Kevin Nontell.
All three men said they thought at first that the car had been placed in the canal as a teenagers' prank.

"It sounded so far-fetched," Nontell said. "I thought it was a joke."
The canal workers marked photos to help the Crown locate small pieces of evidence they found at the scene that day, including plastic lettering off the back of the Nissan and pieces of plastic later identified as belonging to the Shafias' second vehicle, a Lexus.

The Crown is alleging that the Nissan was driven over a curb along Kingston Mills Road, around a large rock cut, then sharply back to the edge of the canal before it was driven and bumped into the water.
"It just seemed like a real odd place to find a car and probably not that easy to get in there. It would have taken some effort," Nontell said. "It looked like something that would be planned."
Kemp and McCann have been suggesting that the route made no sense and asked the Parks Canada witnesses if a car could have been driven in along a small path on the opposite side of the locks.

There have also been questions about how many boats were docked at the lock station that night.
Nontell confirmed that there were two - a sailboat that left early the morning of June 30 and a large houseboat.
Nontell said he asked the houseboat operator if he'd heard any noises.
[...]http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/canada/archives/2011/10/20111024-212500.html

http://i52.tinypic.com/wwj8n6.jpg

Photo purported to show Rona Amir Mohammed at her marriage to Mohammad Shafia.Preserving 'honour'
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/1230543695001

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

Whisper

October 25th, 2011, 11:05 PM

Canal locks murder trial sees grisly video
OCT 25 2011

Ontario jurors saw for themselves today how the bodies of three teenage sisters and another family member looked suspended in water in a car at the bottom of a canal.
But the girls' mother, one of the people accused of killing them, asked to leave the courtroom so she didn't have to see the eerie video shot by a police diver.

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

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

The Crown alleges the Montreal family thought their daughters betrayed them by having boyfriends, so they killed them and staged the scene to look like an accident.
The Video[...]
The 14-minute underwater video shot by provincial police Const. Glenn Newell was uneventful for the first 10 minutes, but when he pans up past the door panel, a pair of legs can be seen in the first in a series of grisly discoveries.

The jury could then see the head of one of the victims, facing down and with hair obscuring her face. Blankets, a purse, yellow bag, a torso and a hand of a victim are seen in the passenger side window on the driver's side.
No one is sitting in the driver's seat.

In the backseat are Rona Amir Mohammad and Sahar, who court has heard was "given" to Mohammad by Yahya to raise as her own, because Mohammad couldn't have children. The two were especially close, court has heard.
Their bodies were found sitting side by side, their heads touching.
Newell testified on Monday that although one car window was open, it appeared that none of the victims had tried to get out of the vehicle.
"I would think it would make it very simple for somebody, who could get to that window, to get out of that window," he said.
The cause of death for all four victims was drowning, but it isn't possible to say for certain that they drowned in the canal where they were found, the Crown has said. Three of them had bruising on the top of their heads.
The Crown theory of the car's path is that it would have had to travel past a locked gate, over a concrete curb and a rocky outcrop and then make two U-turns to end up in the locks of the canal.
Motel manager testifies about room check-in
The family had been on their way home from a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont., when the car wound up in the canal.
A Kingston motel manager testified Tuesday that when Shafia and Hamed checked in to two rooms for the family that night, at first Shafia said there would be six guests. There were 10 people on the family trip. An expert will be called later to testify about so-called honour killings and how in extreme cases, killing can be seen in some cultures as a way to restore honour to a family.
[...]
http://www.cbc.ca/m/rich/news/story/2011/10/25/shafia-canal-murder-trial-cp.html

http://i42.tinypic.com/149qqa8.jpg
STUPID BITCH SHOULDNT HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO LEAVE,SHOULDVE TIED HER TO HER CHAIR 2 FEET FROM THE SCREEN

VXIII

October 25th, 2011, 11:07 PM

So were they drowned by the family before being placed in the car? I cant imagine them sitting there and letting themselves drown, they should make this mother hear every damned detail...

Whisper

October 25th, 2011, 11:10 PM

Im thinking maybe unconcious from being whacked in the head

Tundratot

October 26th, 2011, 12:01 AM

Either dead already or drugged maybe.

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 12:53 AM

I havent watched the video yet but here it released couple hours ago,,,they do warn its a disturbing video so watch at own risk

SHOCKING VIDEO WAS PLAYED FOR THE JURY AT THE CANAL MURDER TRIAL TODAY.

.... UNDERWATER VIDEO TAKEN BY AN O-P-P DIVER, AS THE BODIES OF FOUR WOMEN WERE FOUND IN A SUBMERGED CAR AT THE KINGSTON MILLS LOCKS.

ONE OF THE THREE ACCUSED KILLERS, TOOBA SHAFIA, ASKED TO LEAVE THE COURTROOM, AS THE IMAGES WERE PLAYED.

CKWS HAS OBTAINED THE VIDEO.

WE'VE DECIDED TO SHOW SOME OF IT.

AND, A WORD OF CAUTION, THE IMAGES YOU'RE ABOUT TO SEE WILL BE DISTURBING TO SOME VIEWERS.
-[...]

http://www.ckwstv.com/index.cfm?page=news&id=5802

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 12:57 AM

I just watched it and I didnt see anything disturbing,kinda fuzzy video so not great quality

VXIII

October 26th, 2011, 02:13 AM

Thanks Whisper, I didnt see anything either but I was wondering about the statement made by the motel owner, he said they rented 2 rooms and he only saw the father and oldest son, they checked in then headed towards the 401, would the 401 take them home to Ontario or to the place where the girls and car were found? Im not familiar at all with Canada, barely familiar with my own area :D

This case makes me really sad, those were women who deserved a life and if he and his wife didnt want them, they should have let them go, and what makes this doubly disgusting is the brother is allowed to have a free life and do as he pleases but the women cant, hypocrites... and Geeti just looked so sad I could see in her picture how trapped she felt... I could hear the despair in the words Rona wrote in her diary, she is now speaking for all of them... and her words will help convict these assholes...

Just for a moment, how is this going to play out when they meet Allah, he will ask have you lived a good life, can they honestly face him and say Oh yes Allah, I lived a good life, I murdered my first wife and daughters but they deserved it, when Allah asks on what grounds did they deserve it, well I didnt want to be married to my first wife anymore and my oldest daughter wanted to marry a man she loved, the 2 others because it would rid me of the problems of dealing with their culture shock... I dont think their Allah will be very pleased from the little I know of the Quran...

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 12:37 PM

401 is in Ontario it isnt far from me to get onto it ,maybe 3 miles from my house
Its a major highway in Ontario so its all through from me to Toronto and Chatham etc
Im not exactly sure where it is further up where they were
I think what gets me is they said they had 6 people and there were 10 on the trip
So they mustve murdered them on the way there before check in OR they didnt plan for those 4 to sleep there through the night and didnt want to pay extra b/c they are cheap killers
Either way Im not sure if shows premeditation or just dishonesty either way
Highway 401 between me and Chatham is called carnage alley,they wouldve been further ahead to fake an accident there,
prob wouldve gotten away with that one

Pretty sure the further you go up it turns into the 402 DamagedGoods prob knows better shes further up from me

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 08:11 PM

VXIII
I asked hubby and the 401 runs all the way through Ontario
end to end

Honour killing case rests on a mountain of circumstantial evidence — and the eyes of experts

KINGSTON, Ont. — Now, judges routinely tell jurors that there's no difference between so-called direct evidence, such as witness testimony, and indirect or circumstantial evidence.
Especially in a CSI-driven era, when people may expect that every case has high-tech video and DNA, if not also a telepathic detective or two, it's a useful reminder of the more mundane nature of real-world crime investigation.
And indeed, in the murder trial of Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their 21-year-old son Hamed, Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger did just that.
On the first day of trial last week, Maranger told jurors that "both kinds of evidence count; the law treats them equally."
But suffice to say there may not be a jury in the country more excruciatingly familiar with the circumstantial stuff than this one.
Shafia, Wife No. 2, and their son, are each pleading not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in the June 30, 2009, drowning deaths of four of their family members — sisters Zainab, Sahar and Getti, respectively 19, 17 and 13, and Shafia's first, and sadly infertile, wife, Rona Mohammad Amir, 53.

The prosecution's case against the three, to judge by Crown prosecutor Laurie Lacelle's opening statement, involves plenty of both sorts of evidence.
There will be a truckload of witnesses who will testify here about what one or another of the accused told them. There are videotaped police interviews to be heard with each of the accused trio. There are police wiretaps to be played of the family's conversations — some quite ghastly — after the four bodies were found.

And Thursday, the jurors will be taken to the Kingston Mills locks about 20 minutes out of town — the alleged scene of the crime and certainly the place where a black Nissan was discovered submerged in the water there, with the four women in it, the car improbably wedged in a small space between a lock gate and the push bar used to move it.

There, the jurors will see the place they have heard so much about and, as Maranger said Wednesday, get the chance "to better appreciate some of the evidence."

But absent eyewitnesses who saw the Nissan going into the water, or a videotape of same, or a breast-beating confession — the prosecutors have none of these — much of their case rests upon a mountain of circumstantial evidence and the expert interpretation of it.

The prosecutors' theory is that the parents and son jointly planned what they call the deliberate murder of the four females, even researching murder on the web and the best places to commit it; that they attempted to cover up what they'd done by first blaming their eldest daughter for taking the keys to the Nissan and causing the fatal "accident," and even staged a fake car crash to explain the damage to Shafia's grey Lexus SUV; that they were motivated by a desire to restore family honour (thus the curious term "honour killing") purportedly tainted by their rebellious daughters and their taking of boyfriends and wearing of makeup and revealing clothing.

Key are the links between the Nissan and the Lexus and the quality of work performed by Kingston Police, the OPP experts they used and the analysis of other experts at the provincial crime lab in Toronto.

A week in, there are already 66 exhibits, some with multiple items.

There's a "curb series" of photographs (showing the curb the Nissan allegedly jumped at Kingston Mills to get close to the water) and a "scuff series" (showing various black marks on the concrete where the Nissan is alleged to have entered the water) and a "Fitting the Lexus headlight pieces back together again" series of 51 slides (these definitively place the Lexus at Kingston Mills, which revealed the trio's first story to police as a fraud).

There are gouge marks, scratches vertical and horizontal and those indicative of the Nissan rotating.

There are measurements of the two cars, the dead women (their weights were needed to figure out the Nissan's weight and thus its centre of mass), distances (such as from the start of a rock outcropping to a fence pole, and from the front edge of a nearby sluice crab to a set of stairs by the lock gate) and angles (the odd way the front seats were so inclined far back that driving would have been awkward, at the least).

On Wednesday, OPP Const. Chris Prent, an expert in collision reconstruction, was on the stand.

His testimony was complex, with lots of geometry, but at its most simple, his opinion is that the Nissan didn't go into the water under its own steam, but was pushed in by the Lexus, and that the push was needed because the Nissan got hung up on the lock gate, and that it isn't plausible that a simple rear-end collion, such as the one belatedly described by Hamed months after his arrest, could explain the damage to the Nissan.

In short, Prent said, the circumstantial evidence puts the Lexus there at the locks, pushing the Nissan, contrary to what Mama, Papa and Baby Bear first told police.
[..]
Prent will be cross-examined Thursday, after the visit to the locks.http://www.vancouversun.com/Honour+killing+case+rests+mountain+circumstantial+ evidence+eyes+experts/5611958/story.html

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 08:13 PM

Family SUV pushed car into deadly canal plunge, court told

KINGSTON, Ont. - Mohammad Shafia's SUV pushed another car he owned into a shallow canal at an isolated, unlit location more than two years ago, a collision reconstruction expert told a murder trial Wednesday.
[...]
Const. Chris Prent testified that the silver Lexus SUV rammed the Nissan Sentra from behind, as the compact car dangled over a stone precipice, early on the morning of June 30, 2009 at Kingston Mills, Ont., a tiny hamlet on the Rideau Canal.
"There was certain damage present on the Nissan and there was certain damage present on the Lexus SUV that coincide and it's my opinion that the Lexus was used to push the Nissan over the edge of the canal into the water," Prent testified.
The accused mother and father said publicly that they believed their eldest daughter took the Sentra for a joyride, without their permission, and crashed it into the canal. The family, originally from Afghanistan, had stopped in Kingston for an overnight rest while driving home to Montreal from Niagara Falls, Ont.

The Sentra was found by Parks Canada staff submerged in about three metres of water, next to the large wooden door of a lock. Inside were the bodies of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 52. Autopsies showed they drowned, though the time and place they drowned could not be pinpointed.
Prent said many bits of "unusual" evidence suggested the Sentra did not go into the water on its own. The vehicle's ignition was off, the headlights were off, the transmission was in first gear and none of the four occupants were wearing seatbelts when they were found. The two front bucket seats also were reclined at angles of roughly 45 degrees, an "unnatural" position for a driver, he said. The car's front end was pointed toward the stone ledge from which it appeared to have tumbled.
Prent, who has analyzed more than 150 collisions, focused on the smashed front left corner of the Lexus and the damaged left rear corner of the Sentra. The Sentra's tail light was broken and there was a distinct horizontal line on its bumper, Prent said.
Underneath the Sentra, at a point roughly beginning at the car's centre of gravity, undercoating was peeled back. The Ontario Provincial Police officer also noted damage to the bottom of the driver's door that appeared to coincide with damage to a wooden stair near the edge where the car plunged into the water.
Prent said he believes the car was taken to the stone lip of the canal and became snagged on the step, with the front left wheel hanging in the air over the water.
"As the vehicle was hanging over the edge of the canal . . . and the Lexus SUV applied force to the left rear corner, the vehicle started to rotate to free it from the step," he said.The Sentra would have tilted right and then slid over the stone edge, he said, creating a motion that would explain the way the undercoating was peeled back and also why the vehicle ended up apparently backwards in the water. Because there was no damage to nearby canal machinery, he concluded the vehicle went over very slowly.
Prent also studied evidence from a collision involving the Lexus that Hamed reported around 8 a.m. in Montreal on June 30. He called police to say he had struck a guardrail in a parking lot.
"This was an attempt to cover up or get rid of any evidence that may have been consistent with damage caused at Kingston Mills locks," Prent testified. He concluded that the Lexus was deliberately driven into the guardrail twice. The next day, police found the Lexus in the garage of the Shafia home in Montreal.
Defence lawyers have not yet had the chance to question Prent.
Thursday morning, jurors will be taken by bus to Kingston Mills, so they can understand the complex geography of the area where the car was found. It is a rare practice used in criminal trials called "taking a view."
"You're going to be free to move around, look around, look at some of the things you've heard about in court," Justice Robert Maranger told the jurors Wednesday.
The Parks Canada site features four locks that can lift boats 15 metres up from the level of Lake Ontario into the canal system. The sunken Sentra was found just north of the northernmost of the four locks.
The judge barred journalists from taking pictures of him, the lawyers, jurors or accused at the site. The accused mother said she would not take part in the trip. Mohammad and Hamed will be taken in an unmarked van and kept inside the vehicle but in a position that allows them to see what is taking place.http://www2.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=5610510

DamagedGoods

October 26th, 2011, 08:21 PM

Actually, it remains the 401 right up to the border of Quebec where it apparently turns into Highway 20 (But is still technically the same roadway and is almost back to Montreal itself, which sits on the border between Ontario and Quebec)

They were going back & forth from Niagara Falls to Montreal weren't they? They would have had to take the 401 for almost that entire trip, and the 401 goes straight through Kingston on the way, so when they returned to it, they could have been @ almost any point in their trip.

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 08:30 PM

Pete Bondurant

October 26th, 2011, 10:53 PM

Dead, Canadian Muslims....There is no tragedy here.

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 10:53 PM

Not just a murderer but a fucking cheap one to boot

Suspect asked for discount, motel manager tells court
Father, son also disagreed on number in party

Just after half his family was either allegedly murdered - or, at the least, tragically killed in a bizarre accident - Mohammad Shafia was still looking for a deal.

"He was asking could he get a discount," said Robert Miller, the manager of Kingston East Motel where some of the Shafia clan - those who weren't dead, that is - were then staying.

"Can't you give me a better price?" Miller remembered him saying. His reply: "No."
[...]
He said it was about noon on June 30, 2009, when Shafia and Hamed showed up at the motel office to say they'd decided to keep their two rooms for another night. The two had checked in just hours earlier, about 2 a.m., and after a couple of reminders that checkout was 11 a.m., they'd apparently decided to stay - but not without Shafia first trying to strike a bargain.

Hours earlier, at 9 a.m. that same day, the bodies of four members of the sprawling family - three teenage daughters and Shafia's first wife - were pulled from a black Nissan found at the bottom of the Kingston Mills locks, not far away.

Though Shafia, Yahya and Hamed all claimed at first they knew the four were missing only when they woke up that day, Yahya admitted on the day of their arrest the following month that they had all been present at the Kingston Mills locks when the Nissan went into the water there.
If that's true, it means, at minimum, when Shafia was attempting to get his bargain from Miller, he knew his daughters and first wife were at the bottom of the locks.
[...]
. Miller, of course, had no way of knowing of the grim discovery at the locks. But he was taken aback by how Shafia and son had reacted to something he asked them when they woke him early that morning and asked about getting a couple of rooms.

He asked his usual question, standard at every hotel and motel desk in the world: "How many people would there be in the rooms?" But to the two men standing in front of him, the question was a real puzzler.
At first, Miller told Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and the jurors, the men "said there would be six.
"Then the younger gentleman said there might be nine.
"I said, well, how many people is there? And they settled on six."

The math - however elementary - is key, if not revealing. As prosecutor Laurie Lacelle told the jurors in her opening statement last week, it's unclear when the Nissan, with its cargo of women, went into the water. The last cellphone transmission police tracked was at 1: 36 a.m.; the bodies weren't discovered until about 9 a.m.
So it's not known whether the four females were dead, whether by design or accident, when Shafia and Hamed checked in about 2 a.m., or if they died later.
In total, the intact family numbered 10 - Shafia, the two wives and seven children.
Subtract the four who perished, and the number of family members purportedly needing rooms that night would be six.
The "nine" mentioned by Hamed may have stemmed from the fact that he was planning to drive back that night to Montreal, where the family lived; according to what the trio told police, he did go back.
(In fact, he returned to stage an accident in Montreal with his father's Lexus, which he belatedly admitted to police.) In any case, it is surely curious that even in a big family, neither of the men could keep an accurate count of the clan numbers.
Miller certainly remembered the men's confusion. He also found it curious that having just checked in, the pair left the motel shortly after and headed north on Highway 15, back in the direction of the Kingston Mills locks.
Shortly after Shafia made his futile effort to get a deal on the rooms, he, wife No. 2 and Hamed reported the rest of the family missing to Kingston police.
They were treated sympathetically, of course, as people whose relatives had perished tragically.
But things didn't sit so well for long with the police.
First, Hamed neglected to tell them of his "accident" early that morning in Montreal. Then a superbly alert Kingston crime scene officer named Robert Etherington noticed that on a couple of pieces of plastic car parts found at the Kingston Mills locks, there were lines that appeared to match the lines in pieces of the Lexus that had been found at its "accident" scene in Montreal.
He submitted the pieces to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto and on July 9, Kingston police were notified that "the physical match had been confirmed" - that the Lexus, in other words, had also been at the locks.http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Suspect+asked+discount+motel+manager+tells+court/5607803/story.html#ixzz1bwkJPWJy

Whisper

October 26th, 2011, 11:00 PM

Dead, Canadian Muslims....There is no tragedy here.
LOL I dont think they were citizens yet Pete,think they were still just gypsies travelling country to country

http://i42.tinypic.com/ddn7zm.jpg

Pete Bondurant

October 26th, 2011, 11:08 PM

Fucking Albanians! :angry2:

Whisper

October 27th, 2011, 11:05 PM

Shafia murder trial: Jurors explore Kingston locks

KINGSTON, Ont. – In the weeks before four Montreal residents were found dead in a submerged car, a computer in their home was used to search the Internet for documentaries about murders, “where to commit a murder” and for information about bodies of water and boat rentals.

A Kingston police officer who is a forensic electronics expert found a data trail on the laptop, partly by digging through areas of the computer’s memory where deleted files would be hiding, he testified Thursday at the murder trial of Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed, 20.

Constable Derek Frawley told jurors that he found information related to 278,000 websites, though users of the laptop might have thought they deleted evidence of the searches.

“The information is still sitting there, only the first byte changed,” Frawley testified.

On June 30, 2009, sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were found dead in a sunken car in the Rideau Canal in Kingston, near a series of locks. Rona was Mohammad Shafia’s first wife, whom he married when the family still lived in Afghanistan. They moved to Canada in 2007.

The accused, who have pleaded not guilty, are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder. They have claimed publicly that the victims died in a joyride that ended in a tragic accident when their eldest daughter drove the car into the canal.

Frawley’s analysis of the laptop, seized from the Shafia home in St. Léonard, documented dozens of searches in June 2009 that included visits by the computer user to online photos of lakes, rivers and bridges. Dozens of the photos were flashed on large monitors in the courtroom for jurors to see as the officer testified.

There were many visits to scenic locations, including websites reached after searches for “mountains on water in Quebec.”

Frawley said during June 2009, there were thousands of visits to websites after Google map searches including one notable location on June 15.

“The map just happened to be centred on Middle Road and 401 here in Kingston, which is right by the locks area,” Frawley testified.

Jurors now have a better understanding of the complex geography of the spot where the car was found.

They were ferried by bus to the canal, about 10 kilometres north of the courthouse, Thursday morning, along with the judge, lawyers and court staff, in a rare procedure known as “taking a view.”

Despite a biting wind, the 12 jurors, dressed in ski jackets and toques, appeared curious and interested in examining all of the key areas around the property.

One male juror seemed particularly animated. He gestured toward the water with one arm, and then pointed back toward the four locks south of the spot.

Shafia and his son sat in an unmarked police minivan adjacent to the property, at a spot where they could see the jurors. They did not get out of the vehicle. The accused mother refused to make the trip to the canal.

After the morning outing, the jurors heard Frawley’s testimony. He also found evidence of searches for “metal boxes in Montreal,” “iron boxes,” “treasure boxes,” and “huge boxes in Montreal.”

Frawley said the searches were conducted in English with few mistakes. Shafia and his wife speak only broken English. Hamed is fluent in English.

Frawley also recovered several text files including one that included a phone number traced to a gynecologist’s office and a description of antifreeze, or ethylene glycol.

Another text file listed the Web address of a Montreal business, Dante Sports, which describes itself as the city’s most experienced gun shop.

Frawley also found evidence of several Google searches on June 3 beginning with “can a prisoner have control over his real estate.” The words were altered just slightly in two more searches done shortly after the first one.

Frawley said the Windows operating system on the laptop was registered to Shafia.http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Jurors+explore+Kingston+locks/5617001/story.html#ixzz1c2eEgW3N
http://i42.tinypic.com/2ytuu0i.jpg
Police photo of the scene at Kingston Mills, Ont., taken June 30, 2009, showing two police cruisers parked on the property; a police witness testified that driving the vehicles into this area was an error. The bodies of Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, were found in the car. Released exhibit from trial of Mohammad Shafia, 56 and Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 39 Hamed Shafia, 18 who are charged with four counts of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

http://i39.tinypic.com/116i48y.jpg
The jury, judge, Crown attorneys, lawyers and court staff went to the Kingston Mills lock on October 27, 2011.

Shafia jurors taken to where bodies were found
http://www.lfpress.com/news/canada/2011/10/27/18887426.html

VXIII

October 28th, 2011, 02:54 AM

Thanks for the maps Whisper, helped to be able to picture what they were talking about, no way a car could accidently get in there...

These motherfucker planned and plotted for weeks to murder these women, they researched all kinds of ways to get rid of them, their own family, I cant and never will understand this level of hypocrisy, they murdered them because they were according to them "sinning against god and islam" but not to worry, it is OK to scheme and kill them then lie to the police about it... They werent even smart about it, ignition off, no lights, its like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum planned this...:secruity:

More pics of Zainab & Sahar 5 days before their murders...

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/ZainibSafar.jpghttp://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/saharbikini.jpg

Tooba Yayha, you shameful dirty whore, where is your hijab??? I dont get how it was so important these girls wear a hijab to school, where they were probobly ridiculed for doing so but here is this bitch parading around for all to see...

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g411/V_XIII/tooba.jpg

Tundratot

October 28th, 2011, 03:12 AM

Looking at the pictures of the locks and the park area surrounding it, I'm convinced the car didn't end up in there by accident. I can't see a straight or even mildly curving line of travel into it that wouldn't be met with a wall or a stone outcropping. I can't, though, figure out how the car got into the lock while in first gear. If the ignition was off it would have been a very difficult push for the Lexus. That car would have bucked and jumped and torn up turf the whole way. If it was in fact being pushed backward (as I seem to remember), same thing. And why are pieces of the Lexus found on the other side of the stone outcropping? The most direct route into the lock appears to have involved a sharpish turn off the road.

Whisper

October 28th, 2011, 12:49 PM

Whisper

October 28th, 2011, 09:59 PM

Mohammad Shafia's police interview played at honour killing trial

KINGSTON, Ont. — Three hours after police told Mohammad Shafia that his missing daughters likely were dead in a submerged car, he gave an officer a calm, hour-long account of the family's actions in the previous 24 hours.
"I don't know what has happened," the Montreal businessman said through an interpreter, in an interview with a detective that was videotaped at the Kingston Police station on the afternoon of June 30, 2009. "We woke up in the morning, didn't see the car, didn't see the kids, don't know."
The interviewer, Det. Const. Geoff Dempster, asked if Shafia had any idea, "a thought" perhaps about what happened.

Shafia said he had wondered if the missing people drove to Montreal.

"You know the car, your car, the Nissan, was found underwater?" Dempster asked.

Shafia acknowledged that the officer already had told him this.

"Any thoughts, any idea how it got there?" Shafia said no.

"This is the first time that such a thing happened," he said.

Dempster began testifying Friday and the videotape was played for jurors at the murder trial of Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son Hamed, 20. Each is charged with four counts of first-degree murder. They have pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors allege that the four victims died in an honour killing staged to look like a tragic car crash into a shallow canal.

Shafia's interview was conducted through an interpreter because he speaks limited English. The family, originally from Afghanistan, moved to Canada in 2007 and settled in St. Leonard, a borough of Montreal.

At the time of the interview, police believed — although they were not certain — that four Shafia family members were dead in a car, a Nissan Sentra, found at the bottom of the Rideau Canal at the Kingston Mill locks around 8:30 a.m. that day.

Later in the day, the bodies of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 52 — Shafia's first wife — were pulled from the car.

The father, mother and son had arrived at the Kingston Police station around 12:30 p.m. on June 30 and reported that four family members and their Sentra were missing. Rona was described by Hamed, who speaks English and who filed the report, as his aunt. Police learned later that she was Shafia's first wife.

Dempster told the trio that he believed the missing people had been found dead. He testified that his next task was to interview them separately.

Shafia appears relaxed in the video shot by a ceiling-mounted camera in a small interview room. He often gestured with an arm or hand. No emotion was visible.

He said that the family was driving home from a vacation in Niagara Falls, Ont., and decided to stop at a motel in Kingston around 1 a.m. because his wife was too tired to continue driving. They were turned away from the first motel where they stopped because it was full.

Shafia knelt on the carpeted floor of the interview room and traced an imaginary straight line to show that the motel where they stayed was on the same road as the first motel.

As soon as they stopped, Hamed drove on to Montreal, Shafia said, after telling his father he had work to do. The rest of the family went to sleep. Shafia said the Sentra was gone when they awoke the next morning.

"I just didn't find the kids, that made me worried," Shafia told his interviewer.

He said that the four missing family members were sleeping in one of two motel rooms together. The remaining family members stayed in the other room.

Shafia called Hamed in Montreal and asked him to come back to Kingston so they could go to the police station, he told Dempster. Hamed returned in a different vehicle, the family's Pontiac minivan.

Dempster asked why he didn't drive back in the vehicle that the family had taken to Niagara Falls, a Lexus SUV.

I don't know why," Shafia said.
Jurors already have heard that police believe the Lexus was damaged when it was used to push the Sentra over a stone ledge and into the canal. Police found the Lexus in the garage of the Shafia home on July 1 and photographed damage to its front left corner.
[...]

http://www.canada.com/news/Mohammad+Shafia+police+interview+played+honour+kil ling+trial/5624139/story.html#ixzz1c8E0fVn4

You know I was thinking tonight
every "Honor Killing" Ive ever read about,the fathers/sons/brothers admit to the killling and say why
They have always manned up and accepted punishment b/c all in all their honor is restored to the family b/c of it
these pukes cant even do that right
Wasnt a "real" honor killing just cold murder(as are all honor killings)

Tundratot

October 29th, 2011, 12:23 AM

I think they usually admit it because in Muslim countries, they get very light sentences and everyone agrees with their action. This family was sophisticated enough to know that wouldn't be the case here.

Gislaine Carignan

October 31st, 2011, 03:10 PM

Whisper

October 31st, 2011, 03:17 PM

I have no clue what your attempting to say
But I do agree you commit a crime in a country you live by their laws
We all have to learn things but in a case like this I think asking to learn to forgive and forget is a little to much,
they murdered 4 people
They deserve everything they have coming at them and actually Id love if they were sentenced by Sharia law,
they sentenced these women by it why shouldnt they be sentenced by it except here in Canada we cant do that
Cases like this make me wish we had the DP
JMHO

Tundratot

October 31st, 2011, 03:38 PM

Nobody speaks about Arab or what ever.

We all talk about the murder of 3 women by a polygamist and his second wife and son.

When you live in a country you have to respect the law. It is the same for ALL CANADIANS, and all country.

When you write ''I am flexible'' are you serious???? Who has the right to decide whom have to live and whom have to die. ''Stone him to death'' wow what a lovely idea. Here we say ''Don't do to others what you would'nt want they do to you'' or ''Love your neighbour as yourself''.

No wonder that war exist whit such a philosophy of life. We are here to lurn to love, to understand, to care for one an other, not to be the police of everybody around. Who are we to decide. This is the job of the justice system, not ours. And thank Goodness that Canada don't have death penalty with the kind of mind that you are showing. What about an error of justice? Too bad he's dead, ups sorry!

May the Life help every body to lurn to forgive and forget, to love and not hate, to be kind and open, to care and to share.
I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here. If anyone here said they are flexible, it would have to be in the context of what sentence to impose -- Life or Death -- since no one on this site has taken up support for the idea of honor killing and, as far as I can remember, no one has suggested that the evidence here suggests someone else did it. The Life or Death question is moot, isn't it, since Canada does not impose the death penalty.

I think you are suggesting that no one here should be out for blood, death penalty or not. No one here is going to go after the parents and brother of the slain girls and their "aunt" in actuality. We are all incensed over the idea of honor killing, and over the idea that a parent (much less both parents, and a brother, and husband) could think that the adoption of western ideas and mores should constitute a loss of honor or an excuse to kill.

I'm not about to forgive that. I do not sanction going to war with those countries where this kind of action is considered de rigour, because it's pointless. But I do not sanction people fleeing from those countries bring that utter nonsense with them, that is pointless and unforgivable.

Whisper

November 2nd, 2011, 01:49 AM

Shafia murder trial: Defendant in Shafias' murder trial devoid of emotion in video

KINGSTON, Ont. – Confronted by a police officer with the suggestion that the deaths of three daughters was not an accident, Tooba Mohammad Yahya appeared devoid of emotion in a video shown Tuesday to jurors in a murder trial.
“Meaning what?” Yahya responded, through an interpreter, in an interview recorded just hours after police had told her the girls had been found dead in a submerged car.

“It would mean something happened to cause it,” Kingston police Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster says in the video played Tuesday morning at the trial of the Montreal woman, her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their 20-year-old son, Hamed, who are accused of murdering four family members in an honour killing. Yahya, 41, repeated several times that she had no idea what happened.
[...]
Dempster pressed the woman, telling her that he believed the family was not being truthful.
“I can’t say something that I don’t know; I can’t tell a lie,” she said, near the end of a calm, hour-long interview.
Jurors also watched video of two police interviews with Hamed Shafia that day. Police were puzzled about his strange story of driving home from Kingston alone at 2 a.m., only to return later that morning in a different vehicle. He told Dempster he had many small reasons to switch cars. He said he didn’t know what happened to his sisters and his “aunt.” He guessed that his eldest sister, Zainab, took the Sentra without permission and crashed it into the canal.
Dempster told Hamed he believed he knew more than he was saying.

I’m telling the truth here,” Hamed replied. “I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jurors have been told that police believe another Shafia family vehicle was used to push the Sentra in the canal to conceal the killing, and that vehicle was damaged in the process. Police later found the family’s Lexus SUV, with front-end damage, inside the garage of their St. Léonard home.
[...]
“If I would have witnessed something or caused it, I wouldn’t keep quiet,” Hamed told Dempster in his first interview that day.http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Defendant+Shafias+murder+trial +devoid+emotion+video/5640116/story.html#ixzz1cWZ08ilo

Whisper

November 2nd, 2011, 01:52 AM

I havent read through all of this yet so not sure if it hits on their citizenship status
Ill read more tomorrow when I have time but heres a link to Canadian Immigration on the case

http://i41.tinypic.com/w1ah3s.jpg
Polygamist lier Mohammad Shafia and his clan plead not guilty of quadruple first-degree murder
http://www.cireport.ca/2011/11/polygamist-lier-mohammad-shafia-and-his-clan-plead-not-guilty-of-quadruple-first-degree-murder.html

Tundratot

November 2nd, 2011, 03:54 AM

Lying to infidels is not a sin in Islamic tradition. It's just playing around.
http://www.islamreview.com/articles/lyingprint.htm

Whisper

November 2nd, 2011, 07:13 PM

Not updated yet I just found this little quip from noon today

Shafia mother pleads ignorance in police video

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

The police videotape was shown to a jury in Kingston, Ont., Wednesday, during the canal locks death trial where the woman, her husband and her son face multiple first-degree murder charges.
[...]http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/11/02/shafia-trial-in-kingston.html

Whisper

November 2nd, 2011, 07:16 PM

This is really good for anyone that needs to catch up or just wants to know what happened when

Timeline: Shafia family murder trial
http://www.globaltoronto.com/timeline+shafia+family+murder+trial/6442509727/story.html

Whisper

November 2nd, 2011, 11:33 PM

Shafia murder trial: ‘No, I wasn’t there,’ accused told cops

KINGSTON, Ont. – Confronted by a police officer with the suggestion that the deaths of her three daughters was not an accident, Tooba Mohammad Yahya appeared devoid of emotion.
“Meaning what?” she responded, through an interpreter, in an interview recorded just hours after police had told her that the teenage girls had been found in a submerged car.
It would mean that something happened to cause it,” Det.-Constable Geoff Dempster says, in the video played to jurors Tuesday morning at the trial of the Montreal woman, her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their 20-year-old son, Hamed, who are accused of murdering four family members in an honour killing.
The trio was interviewed by police on June 30, 2009, as officers struggled to understand how the family’s Nissan Sentra, carrying four people, ended up at the bottom of the Rideau Canal.
Dempster pressed the woman, telling her that he believed that the family was not being truthful.
“I can’t say something that I don’t know; I can’t tell a lie,” she said, near the end of a calm, hour-long interview.
The mother speculated that her daughter took the family car for a joyride, without permission because she wanted to drive, though she had no licence.
“She desired a lot,” she told Dempster. “I think she thought, ‘My mom and dad are asleep; let’s go for a drive.’ ”
The trio now accused of murder had appeared at the police station around 12:30 p.m. on June 30 and reported that four family members and the Sentra were missing. Before they were interviewed by officers, they were told that the sunken car had been found and the family members likely were dead inside it. In their interviews, the three told slight variations on the same story.

They said that the family was driving home to Montreal from a vacation in Niagara Falls and decided to stop at a motel in Kingston because they were tired. They checked into two rooms at around 1 a.m. Hamed left immediately to drive home to Montreal, while the eldest daughter asked for the keys to the Sentra, ostensibly to retrieve clothes.

In the morning, the Sentra and four family members were missing.
Dempster asked the mother if she was at the isolated canal property when the car plunged into the water
No, no, I wasn’t there,” she replied.
She said she did not see her daughter drive off after giving her the car keys.
If I knew (what happened) I would tell you everything,” she said. “I just know that she took the keys from me and … I was very tired and I went to bed.”
Jurors also watched Dempster press Hamed Shafia to explain his decision to drive back to Montreal alone at 2 a.m. after the family had just arrived in Kingston from a long evening of driving.
The young man said he had business to do and he wanted to retrieve a laptop from the family’s St. Léonard home.
In the second interview, Dempster confronted him about hiding an accident he reported to Montreal police around 8 a.m. that morning. Shafia called police to report a collision with a guardrail in a parking lot on Langelier Blvd., blocks from the family’s home.
“Why are you hiding that information from me, Hamed?” Dempster asked.
“If I would tell you, you would go tell my dad; that’s uh, that’s the thing,” Shafia answered.
Prosecutors allege that Hamed staged the collision in Montreal to conceal damage to the Lexus that it suffered when it was used to push the Sentra over a stone ledge into the canal.
Police found the Lexus in the family’s garage on July 1, with damage to its front driver’s side corner.
Hamed told Dempster that after he drove to Montreal that morning, he got a call from his father to tell him about the missing family members so he drove back to Kingston in the family’s minivan.
He said he took that car because it was better on gas.
Dempster told Hamed he didn’t believe he was telling him the whole story.
“I’m telling the truth here,” Hamed replied. “I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”
[...]
Dempster suggested Hamed was driving the Lexus and followed his sister when she drove off in the Sentra.
“If I would have witnessed something or caused it, I wouldn’t keep quiet,” Hamed told Dempster.
Jurors also watched the first few minutes of a six-hour videotaped interrogation of the accused mother that was recorded the day she was arrested, July 22, 2009.
[...]http://www.montrealgazette.com/Shafia+murder+trial+wasn+there+accused+told+cops/5642064/story.html#ixzz1cbpbunzu

http://i43.tinypic.com/34pi9hf.jpg

An image from a Kingston police department video shows murder suspect Tooba Mohammad Yahya being questioned on June 30, 2009, by Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster.

HijabiGirl

November 3rd, 2011, 08:55 AM

Nobody speaks about Arab or what ever.

We all talk about the murder of 3 women by a polygamist and his second wife and son.

When you live in a country you have to respect the law. It is the same for ALL CANADIANS, and all country.

When you write ''I am flexible'' are you serious???? Who has the right to decide whom have to live and whom have to die. ''Stone him to death'' wow what a lovely idea. Here we say ''Don't do to others what you would'nt want they do to you'' or ''Love your neighbour as yourself''.

No wonder that war exist whit such a philosophy of life. We are here to lurn to love, to understand, to care for one an other, not to be the police of everybody around. Who are we to decide. This is the job of the justice system, not ours. And thank Goodness that Canada don't have death penalty with the kind of mind that you are showing. What about an error of justice? Too bad he's dead, ups sorry!

May the Life help every body to lurn to forgive and forget, to love and not hate, to be kind and open, to care and to share.

This person made an account and posted for the first time responding to my post on the first page. I must say I am tickled pink to cause such a strong reaction. I am not sure exactly what this person is trying to convey but if she wants to follow the golden rule " Do unto others..." after someone kills her children then by all means, have at it. I stand by my statement stating that the only acceptable justice for these innocent women is the death of their slayer(s). This appears completely premeditated and done in utterly cold blood.

We are taking about a FATHER plotting and carrying out the deaths of his CHILDREN and Wife. If this were my child I would want blood for her life, by my own hands if necessary. There is no way I would trust the justice system, especially one that coddles murderers, to give retribution if my daughter was killed in cold blood. I would never forget and I would NEVER forgive if someone murdered my child. Maybe you're all highbrow and stuff but not me.

ETA: hopefully you "lurn" something from this site

Whisper

November 3rd, 2011, 08:12 PM

Shafia trial: Accused mother admits family was at canal
Bombshell; Made admission during interrogation

A Montreal woman accused of killing her three teenage daughters acknowledged during a police interrogation that she had been told that her husband wanted to kill one of the girls.
"Believe me, he had never mentioned about killing them as, 'I want to kill the children,' " Tooba Mohammad Yahya said. "Not all, just her [Zainab]." The 41-year-old woman is on trial, along with her husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their son, Hamed, 20, on four counts of first-degree murder. The Afghan immigrants have pleaded not guilty
[...]
The accused mother was interrogated by two officers for six consecutive hours. A video recording of the interview was played at the murder trial Wednesday. Court adjourned after roughly five hours of the video had been screened.
Yahya acknowledged, after three hours of questioning, that her brother had told her, before the deaths, that her husband "wants to kill" Zainab. Jurors already have heard that Shafia was angry that Zainab left home for several weeks and hid in a women's shelter. She also had planned to marry a young Pakistani man.
The entire interrogation was done in Farsi, a variant of Yahya's native language, Dari. The video played in court was subtitled in English and jurors were given a 215-page transcript.
The first officer to question Yahya, Constable Azi Sadeghi, handed her a photo album containing snapshots of her children. The woman began to sob as she leafed through the album. At one point, she clutched the album to her face. The officer asked her if she had killed the four victims.
"Man nakoshtam," she said in her native language.
"I haven't killed."
"If you try to be honest and start, you know, talking to me, open your heart," the officer responded.
"I don't have anything in my heart except the grief of my children; I don't have anything else," Yahya said.
When the officer left the room for a few minutes, the accused mother continued to weep and muttered several times, "Oh my God."
As her videotaped sobs filled the courtroom, her husband began to cry in the prisoner's box. Shafia held his hand to his eyes and turned his head, as if he could not bear to watch the video, played on three large monitors.
Hamed Shafia showed no visible emotion. He stared down at a binder in his lap, which contained the transcript.
Just more than an hour into the interview, the second officer, Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh, takes over. The veteran Mountie is a trained interrogator and major crime investigator from British Columbia.
He appeals to the woman's maternal instincts, asking her to do the right thing for her dead children and tell the truth, as a proper Muslim. For more than four hours, Yahya insists she can't explain how the victims died.
"Man manifahmam," she is heard saying repeatedly.
"I don't know." The inspector is relentless, often insisting that the woman is lying. He wrests an admission from her after roughly 4½ hours of questioning.
Yahya tells the officer that she, her son and husband were at the canal, around 1: 30 in the morning on June 30, when the Nissan went into the water. She said her husband was driving the Sentra and she and her son Hamed were standing near the other vehicle, the family's Lexus SUV.
"I heard a noise," she said. "Hamed and I heard it. We both ran and we saw that a car was in the water. This car has fallen into the water."
Yahya said she did not know how the car got into the water.
"I screamed and fell down," she said, and became "unconscious."
She awoke later, she said, at a nearby motel, where the family had earlier rented rooms.
She told the officer that she believed the car was empty when it went into the water. She also explained that before the two cars got to the canal, she had switched places with her husband, so that he took over driving the Sentra.
"I request you one thing that never tell my husband - that I have said this," Yahya told the inspector.
Prosecutors allege that the victims died in an honour killing staged to look like a car crash. Jurors have been told that Shafia believed his daughters had shamed him by consorting with boys and dressing in revealing Western clothes. They also have been told that Tooba had sought to cut off Rona from Shafia and spoke dismissively of her role in the family.http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+trial+Accused+mother+admits+family+canal/5648666/story.html#ixzz1cgsAlUE1

http://i42.tinypic.com/33nk9p4.jpg
Tooba Mohammad Yahya is one of three Montrealers on trial in Kingston, Ont., on four counts of first-degree murder. All have pleaded not guilty.

Whisper

November 3rd, 2011, 08:13 PM

Wonder who the daughters looked like b/c shes fugly it sure wasnt her

Whisper

November 3rd, 2011, 08:18 PM

Mother in honour killing trial admits she saw car underwater, did nothing

KINGSTON, Ont. — On the lengthy video police interview now being played for Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and a jury, Tooba Mohammad Yahya pressed her face into the pictures of her children, wept, threw back her head and for a long while keened.
From the prisoner's box, with a full view of her own torment on the screen before her, Yahya also cried from time to time, and once bent over at the waist, her head to the floor, and disappeared from view altogether for about 15 minutes.
It was distressing, as it always is to hear a person howl in pain — but then, this is Yahya we are describing, and she is no stranger, shall we say, to the theatre arts.
Indeed, in the first two-thirds of the interview the jurors have seen on video Yahya also occasionally protested that she was tired, weak or sick and that her mind was not stable, flirted with her handsome male interrogator, albeit in a perfectly proper Muslim/Afghan way (it is not unlike Protestant flirting, except with more flowery language), argued with him, disagreed with him and pretty much stood her ground.
Only hours into the interview did she finally admit that on the night her three daughters and "that lady" — as she invariably and dismissively called Rona Amir Mohammad, ostensibly her husband's cousin, but in truth his first wife — drowned in a black Nissan, she and her precious son Hamed heard the splash of the car entering the water at the Kingston Mills locks and ran toward it, "and we saw that a car was in the water."
[...]
But did she or Hamed do anything? Did they try to save the girls? Leap into the dark water? Call police?
They did not, Yahya acknowledged — in her case, she said, because of course she swooned from the shock and "fell down" and "became unconscious," as she is wont to do, and as for her son, she suggested, perhaps didn't have his cellphone.
"When the noise of the water came," she told Farsi-speaking RCMP Inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh, who had been brought in by Kingston Police to interrogate her, "we ran. We ran and came. At that moment, I became so stressed, as I didn't understand . . . I fell down. I screamed and fell down."
It was July 22, 2009, about three weeks since the death car had been discovered at the bottom of the most southerly of the Rideau Canal locks.
Yahya, now 41, her husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and Hamed, now 20, had been arrested earlier that day in connection with the deaths of the four women. The remaining children had been placed with a relative.
The parents and son are charged with four counts of first-degree murder each, and all are pleading not guilty.
Until this admission that she, Hamed and Shafia were at the locks, Yahya had stuck stubbornly to her story, denying they were there that night, or that she had any knowledge of what could have happened to wipe out half her family.
For all Mehdizadeh's efforts — he both spoke softly to her and flat out called her a liar, invoked their common religion, praised her role as a mother, twice put a comforting hand on her shoulder — her admissions were few and far between.
She admitted the three were there that night. She admitted that yes, her husband had once confided he wanted to kill the oldest ughter, Zainab, and that her brother had mentioned something about Shafia "wanted to kill or wants to kill something like that."
But even then, she had an explanation.
In a bit of nonchalance reminiscent of Karla Homolka's most infamous remark — that her husband, the killer Paul Bernardo, wanted to have sex with her baby sister only "the once," and it was just the once and Tammy Homolka died during the drugging attack — Yahya elaborated.
"Believe me he (Shafia) had never mentioned about killing them, as, 'I want to kill the children.' Not all, just her, because. . . "
Mehdizadeh interrupted: "Which one? What is the name?"
"Zainab," Yahya replied.
You see, it was just the one daughter Shafia confided he'd like dead. No wonder Yahya didn't give it a second thought.
Despite these late-in-the-game admissions to Mehdizadeh, she was still adamantly insisting that she didn't help in any plan to off the girls, that she didn't know of any plan, that at most critical moments she was sick, or asleep, or unconscious.
Pushed, she seemed prepared to let the chips fall where they may, so long as they fell at Shafia's feet. Any mention of Hamed's alleged role, any suggestion that Hamed was less than noble, and Yahya leaped like a mother tiger protecting her cub.
Mehdizadeh was skeptical. He told her that all the Afghans he knew would sacrifice their lives to save a family member. Yahya agreed. Yet all three of them, by her own account, had at minimum seen the car in the water and not lifted a finger.
[...]http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Mother+honour+killing+trial+admits+underwater+noth ing/5650575/story.html#ixzz1cgvM6mJT

I follow this reporters column everynight she puts it like it is

Tundratot

November 3rd, 2011, 09:52 PM

So, up until now it seems that all the coverage was placing the actually dirty work at the son's (Hamed's) feet. It seemed that Yahya and Shafia, though probably collaborating, had not been there. But this testimony seems to suggest that not only were they all three there, but that it was Shafia that did the work. Interesting that she wants him not know what she said about it, and that she's pathetically driven to protect her son. (God forbid she want to protect her daughters.)

She claims she didn't know the women were in the car, but what was the purpose of pushing the car into the canal otherwise? And, if she know that Shafia wanted to kill even one of her children, why didn't that raise alarms?

So, there is still the question of what was going on with the women in the car? Were they drugged? Dead already?

Whisper

November 3rd, 2011, 09:56 PM

Whisper

November 4th, 2011, 01:28 PM

Shafia murder trial: Accused father to undergo surgery

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

The nine-day-old trial of Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their son, Hamed, 20, was abruptly halted Thursday morning after Shafia was hospitalized Wednesday night because of a “serious medical emergency.” Neither police or his lawyer would reveal why.
The trial, slated to run for up to 10 weeks, was adjourned until Tuesday.

“One of the accused has taken ill,” Justice Robert Maranger told jurors, who could see that Shafia was missing from the prisoner’s box. “It was a medical emergency, a fairly serious one.
We’re going to adjourn (the trial) until Tuesday for the lawyers to sort of get the feedback on the status of the medical situation.”

In an interview outside the courtroom, Shafia’s Kingston lawyer, Peter Kemp, said that his client was expected to undergo surgery Friday at a Kingston hospital. He said he didn’t know the nature of the problem.
“My understanding is, there’s some sort of a surgical procedure scheduled for (Friday) and I suspect the doctor’s going to say, ‘Well, until I do the surgery, I won’t know.’ ”
Kemp said he got a phone call at home at 7:30 Thursday morning from a Kingston police officer, telling him about the development. The news plunged the complex case into a legal limbo governed primarily by the wide-ranging discretion of the trial judge.
Queen’s University law professor Don Stuart said that if Shafia remains ill for a long time and is unable to come back to court, prosecutors could seek to continue without him.
The Crown could bring a motion to sever (Shafia’s trial) and carry on with the other two,” he said.
Shafia could be tried later, once he has recuperated. Severances are normally considered before trials, but can be done after a trial has begun.
Shafia, his wife and son are being tried jointly, under provisions in law that allow the prosecution at one time of several people accused of committing a crime “that arises out of the same transaction.” The same rules provide that in the “interests of justice,” the accused can be tried separately.
“It just means whatever the judges think it means,” Stuart said.
Defendants can also seek severances.
Stuart said the other two accused could oppose a severance by arguing they would be denied the right to cross-examine Shafia, should he testify.
“Maybe the defence counsel would not want the trial continued,” Stuart said.
Staff Sgt. Chris Scott, the Kingston police officer in charge of the case, said in an interview that he learned of the medical problem at 9 p.m. Wednesday.
“It’s strictly a medical issue, no injuries from any assault or any third-party intervention,” Scott said. “I have no information it was a suicide attempt.
cott said Shafia was taken first to a small hospital in Napanee, just west of Kingston where the Quinte Detention Centre is located. It is a provincial jail where the three accused are held each night during the trial. Scott said Shafia was scheduled to be transferred to Kingston General Hospital.
As of noon Thursday, Shafia had not been moved to the bigger Kingston hospital, suggesting he is not critically ill, according to hospital personnel. Although the hospital does not publicly discuss patients, The Gazette has learned that Shafia has been taken from jail to the Kingston hospital six times in the past year for treatment of ongoing medical problems.
The judge told the jury that the trial has been going “very smoothly in terms of time” and he hopes it can resume as soon as possible.

“We want to, obviously, keep the trial going,” Maranger said, before sending jurors home.
Crown prosecutors had presented 17 of a possible 58 witnesses since the trial proper began Oct. 20. The 18th witness, an RCMP officer from British Columbia, was in the midst of his testimony about his interrogations, conducted in Farsi, of two of the accused, when the trial was stopped. The interruption likely poses significant scheduling problems for prosecutors and police.
Several witnesses from Europe were booked to fly to Canada this month to testify. Witnesses from Toronto and Montreal were to appear next week.
[...]
Shafia was recorded saying: “There is nothing more valuable than our honour.” The complete wiretaps have not yet been presented to the jurors.
Honour killing is an ancient cultural practice, still prevalent in some Middle Eastern and south Asian societies, in which women and young girls are killed by family members who believe it is the only way to cleanse a family’s shame. Disobedience, immoral behaviour and loss of virginity, even through rape, can provoke the murders.
[...]http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Accused+father+undergo+surgery/5651621/story.html#ixzz1cl5eUOFF

Tundratot

November 9th, 2011, 12:30 AM

Nov. 4:

“They did what they were going to do at the hospital and they’re going to discharge him this afternoon,” defence lawyer Peter Kemp said Friday morning. “I’ve talked to the Crown and we’re going to try and get the jury back in and try and get this thing rolling on Tuesday instead of Wednesday.”
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Shafia+released+from+hospital/5658141/story.html#ixzz1dB8dK3uO

He was in a section of the hospital specializing in cardiology.

Today:

The Montreal man accused of killing three of his daughters and his first wife asked a relative a month earlier to help him kill his eldest daughter, a murder trial heard Tuesday.

“He told me that we will put her in water and drown her,” the man testified.

The witness, who is related to Tooba Mohammad Yahya, cannot be identified under a temporary court order. The order bars media from publishing information that would identify him, until he has completed his testimony. . . .

Yahya’s relative testified that he spoke to Shafia by telephone around the end of May 2009, when Shafia was in Dubai on business. The man said he wanted to help Yahya sort out family problems. He said he’d been told that Zainab wanted to get married to a young Pakistani man, against the family’s wishes. The man said he wanted to help talk Zainab out of the ill-advised marriage.

The man said he was horrified by what Shafia asked him as soon as they began the conversation.

“He told me, ‘Zainab, she is a stubborn lady and she doesn’t listen to me. She is going to library and (using) Internet. She doesn’t work at home. She goes outside and she has Canadian other friends and she has contact with them and she has contact with a Pakistani guy and these are the reasons I want to kill her,’” the man testified.

He said Shafia was angry and upset and called Zainab a “whore” and “prostitute.” Shafia asked the man to invite Yahya, Zainab and another Shafia child to visit him, on the pretext of having a barbeque, the man testified. He said Shafia suggested they go to an ocean or a beach.

“We just go for that excuse, for that excursion and then … when we get there close to the water, Shafia will just push Zainab into the water, just throw her in the water,” he testified.

The man said he swore at Shafia and hung up the telephone, then tried to call other family members to alert them to the plot. Eventually he reached Yahya and told her.

He said he had conversations with Zainab, before the call with Shafia, in which she described an oppressive home life. She told the man that she was prevented from going to school, was ordered to dress conservatively and wear a traditional Muslim veil, and was urged to marry a man of her father’s choosing.

The man testified that Zainab told him her older brother Hamed spied on her conduct and reported back to her father.

“Zainab, she hated her father and meantime Shafia hated Zainab,” he testified.

“He (Shafia) was the chief of that family,” the man testified. Zainab had grown to understand that she had the right in Canada to choose her own path in life, the man said.

The man said he spoke by telephone with Shafia’s first wife. She told him that her life had “disintegrated” and she “had no worth to Shafia.”

The man said that the woman explained that she had asked Shafia for a divorce and $50,000, but he offered only $2,000.

During cross-examination by Peter Kemp, Shafia’s lawyer, the witness acknowledged that there has been enmity between the two men for many years.[Odd relative to ask for help, in that case.]

“I never called Shafia my enemy … but he called me his enemy,” he said.

Kemp asked why Shafia would recruit someone he considered an “enemy” in a murder plot. The man said that if he helped Shafia, he’d be considered the main suspect, since people would know that the two were not friendly.

“Today you could have seen me in that box,” he said, gesturing toward the prisoner’s box where the three accused sit during the trial. . . .

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+asked+help+kill+daughter+witness/5675885/story.html#ixzz1dB9WhfPU

Whisper

November 9th, 2011, 12:32 AM

Accused asked relative for help in killing daughter, trial told

http://i42.tinypic.com/1zbgc4w.jpg
Mohammad Shafia, Hamid Mohammad Shafia, 20, and Tooba Mohammad Yahya

Whisper

November 9th, 2011, 12:33 AM

lol we were both posting same thing at same time lol

Ill delete and leave pic

Whisper

November 9th, 2011, 03:47 PM

Canal trial accused told police daughters were liars
Nov 9 2011

The father accused in the deaths of his three teenage daughters and another woman told a police interrogator his children were liars, a Kingston, Ont. court heard Wednesday.

[...]
Shafia made the statement in a videotaped interrogation after he, his wife and son were arrested in July 2009.

In the video, Shafia denied killing the four victims or helping to kill them, saying his children were pure and sinless. Two minutes later he said his children were all liars except his son.

During his interrogation, Shafia said his daughters told Quebec youth protection services that he and Yahya beat them, but he didn't know why.http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2011/11/09/shafia-father-video.html

Whisper

November 9th, 2011, 03:52 PM

Shafia trial witness says he has no record of murder-plot call
NOV 9 2011

KINGSTON, Ont. – The man who said Mohammad Shafia tried to recruit him to help kill one of Shafia's daughters testified Wednesday 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 I didn’t talk to Mr. Shafia,” Fazil Javid said on the witness stand Wednesday morning, under questioning by lawyer David Crowe, who represents Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, one of the three murder defendants.
Javid lives in Sweden and is a brother of Yahya. His name had been protected from publication under a temporary court order until he completed his testimony. Javid finished testifying Wednesday morning.
[...]
Javid testified Wednesday that he spoke to Shafia on the telephone in late May or early June while Shafia was in Dubai on business. Javid had hoped to intervene in a family problem with Zainab Shafia, who had run away from home and wanted to marry a young Pakistani man, against everyone’s advice.
[...]
Crowe asked Javid on Wednesday why he said, during testimony at a preliminary inquiry, that the phone call was in early May.
“I might have been mixed up,” Javid said.
Javid said he was at work in his pizza shop in the Swedish city of Oxelosund when he had the phone conversation in which Mohammad Shafia exhorted him to help in a murder plot. Javid said he used a phone card to make the call; his phone service provider said it was unable to provide any record of the call.
Javid said he was so upset by what Shafia said, he had to see a psychologist for counselling. After the Shafia call, he spoke to Zainab but didn’t tell her about the plot.
“You believed [Zainab] was in danger of being killed by her father?” asked lawyer Patrick McCann, who represents Hamed.
Yes,” Javid replied.
“You spoke to her directly on the phone after hearing about the plan and you didn’t say a word to her about it?” McCann wondered.
“No,” Javid replied.
Javid said he called his sister and a brother who lives in Montreal about the scheme.
AFer Javid’s testimony, jurors began watching a videotape of an interrogation of Mohammad Shafia by an RCMP officer.

Early in the tape, Shafia refers to his children as “liars” but he denies that he killed them. Court adjourned for lunch after jurors had seen only a few minutes of the interrogation.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/Shafia+trial+witness+says+record+murder+plot+call/5682266/story.html#ixzz1dEuMDYTH

Tundratot

November 9th, 2011, 04:01 PM

Javid said he was so upset by what Shafia said, he had to see a psychologist for counselling.
If they can't find phone records to prove the call took place, they should be able to verify the counselling took place, and even whether is concerned this topic. It would lend credibility to his story. I think it's also important to note when Shafia was in Dubai on a business trip and verify that, since he is alleged to have made the call during the trip. (Crafty, I'd say. That eliminates a phone record from his home or office.) And what about these people?

Javid said he called his sister and a brother who lives in Montreal about the scheme.

What did they think or do?

Whisper

November 9th, 2011, 04:05 PM

this is still going on today this is just a mid day update

Dakota Valkyrie

November 10th, 2011, 09:00 AM

Canal trial accused told police daughters were liars
Nov 9 2011

The father accused in the deaths of his three teenage daughters and another woman told a police interrogator his children were liars, a Kingston, Ont. court heard Wednesday.

[...]
In the video, Shafia denied killing the four victims or helping to kill them, saying his children were pure and sinless. Two minutes later he said his children were all liars except his son.
It seems that shithead always accuse others of doing what they do. Somehow it justifies their behavior in their own mental-midget minds.

Damned self righteous asshole.

'I don't lie', Shafia tells interrogator as he denies ever being married to his dead wife
RCMP officer spends two frustrating hours questioning father accused in four deaths

Shafia had just finished telling this officer, Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh, that Rona Amir Mohammad was his cousin, and before that his friend, and denied ever being married to her.

The inspector then slid over a picture taken of their wedding at Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel.

"No," said Shafia. "This is it, was her birthday or something. This is not marriage. I haven't married her."

That is what Mehdizadeh's two-hour interview with Shafia was like, the day after his arrest in the June 30, 2009, drowning deaths of his three daughters and Amir. For the inspector, it was akin to dealing with a particularly obtuse six-year-old.http://www.vancouversun.com/Shafia+tells+interrogator+denies+ever+being+marrie d+dead+wife/5686366/story.html

Tundratot

November 10th, 2011, 03:50 PM

For the inspector, it was akin to dealing with a particularly obtuse six-year-old.

Yep. He sounds like one.

Whisper

November 10th, 2011, 08:33 PM

Shafia murder trial: Court sees videotape of Shafia interrogation

KINGSTON, Ont. –
[...]
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.

“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 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.
[..]
http://www.montrealgazette.com/Shafia+murder+trial+Court+sees+videotape+Shafia+in terrogation/5682266/story.html#ixzz1dLu89dxb

Whisper

November 11th, 2011, 12:38 AM

http://i41.tinypic.com/8y9hlz.jpg
This image from a Kingston police videotape shows murder suspect Mohammad Shafia being interrogated in 2009.

KINGSTON, Ont. – Accused multiple murderer Mohammad Shafia talked of wanting to kill his eldest daughter Zainab, the Montreal man’s murder trial has heard from a male relative of the Shafia family for the second time this week.
He said, ‘I’m not happy … and she didn’t do a good thing; if I was there I would have killed her,’ ” Latif Hyderi testified Thursday, recounting a conversation with Shafia.
[...]
Hyderi said he had a telephone conversation with Shafia, while Shafia was in Dubai on business. Shafia said his daughter “wanted to dishonour me” and he called her a “whore” and “prostitute,” he testified.
“She is a dirty curse to me,” Hyderi said, quoting Shafia.
[...]
The man said he spoke to Zainab about her impulsive decision to marry. She told him that her father had never called her by her name, instead using insults like “black snake,” he testified. Zainab told Hyderi she was constantly belittled by her father and subject to rigid rules about where she could go and whom she could see, he said.
[..]
“The only reason that I’m marrying is to get the revenge (for) the cruelty I suffer (from) my father,” Hyderi testified, repeating what he said Zainab told him.
[..]
“There is a lot of cruelty or oppression practised on me from Tooba and Shafia,” Hyderi testified that he was told one day when he bumped into Rona while walking in a park in St. Léonard. He said Rona claimed to have been “beaten a few times” and that she had “significant fear” of Shafia.
Hyderi acknowledged that he had served four years in prison in Afghanistan, during questioning by defence lawyer Peter Kemp.
“I was against the Russian regime who had invaded our land and we did jihad,” he said, explaining why he was jailed.
Kemp asked Hyderi if he was sentenced to life in prison for attempted murder in which a man was attacked with knives in Afghanistan.
“It’s a fabrication,” Hyderi said, later acknowledging that there “was an incident” when he was 14 or 15 years old involving his brother and his brother’s business partner. He insisted he did not go to prison.
Late Thursday, jurors began listening to audio recordings secretly made by police before the Shafias were arrested on July 22, 2009.

The first recording came from a bug hidden inside the family’s Pontiac mini-van on July 18. On that day, Shafia, Yahya and Hamed drove to Kingston from Montreal on invitation from police, who had concocted an elaborate ruse. Officers told the three they believed they had figured out how the victims died in an “accident” and they wanted to demonstrate their theory at the spot where the car was found underwater.
Police had mounted a phony surveillance camera at the scene and when they got there, officers said they would seek to get any video the camera captured.
“There was no camera, they’re lying,” Yahya is heard saying inside the van, after the trio left Kingston to head back to Montreal. “There was no camera. If there had been a camera, they would have taken that out first thing on the very first day.”

Later, Yahya adds: “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, all three of us would have been recorded.”
Shafia responds: “No, had there been one there, they would have checked it first thing and they would have held you to account that night.”
He also notes that it was “pitch darkness” there that night.
“There wasn’t the slightest glimmer of light or electricity,” Shafia is heard saying. “Even that room’s light was off.”[...]

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+murder+trial+Second+relative+says+murder+su spect+wanted+kill+daughter/5691508/story.html#ixzz1dMtRqgCT

Whisper

November 11th, 2011, 09:34 PM

Montreal family's trial hears potentially incriminating wiretaps
11/11/2011

Montreal husband and wife accused of murdering their family were caught on wiretaps apparently placing themselves at the scene of the deaths, despite swearing to police they had not been there and had no idea what happened.
A few weeks after their three daughters and the husband's other wife in a polygamous marriage died in what Tooba Mohammad Yahya and Mohammad Shafia told police must have been a terrible accident, they are heard on potentially incriminating wiretaps fretting about what evidence police have.
[...]
The three can be heard on the wiretap, played in court, fretting about the possibility of a camera, but ultimately concluding police were lying.

"That night there was no electricity there," Shafia says. "It was pitch darkness. You remember, Tooba?"

"Yes," she replies.

The family was speaking Dari, a dialect from their native Afghanistan, but the audio recordings played in court were translated and subtitled in English.

"They say they want to see if the camera has recorded anything or not," Hamed can be heard telling his parents.

"There was no camera over there," Yahya says, adding that she had checked.

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

Toward the end of the wiretap — one of several to be played for the jury — Hamed warns his parents that police might have bugged the car.
The jury has previously seen videos of police interviews of the family the day the bodies were discovered. All three tell police that they had checked into a motel in Kingston that night on their way home from a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont.

Zainab borrowed the car key to ostensibly get clothes out of the car, then the next morning, the four women and girls were gone and so was the car, they said. Zainab, who didn't have a licence, was eager to practise driving so she must have gone for a 2 a.m. joy ride with her sisters and Rona Amir Mohammad and had an accident, the family reasoned.

In an interrogation July 22, the day the family was arrested, Yahya tells police the three of them were at the scene that night, but that her husband must be responsible because she just heard a splash then promptly fainted. She recanted that story the next day, court heard.

Court also heard Thursday from Latif Hyderi, Yahya's uncle, who said the sisters were like "political prisoners" in their home, and Zainab wanted to "sacrifice" herself to marriage in the hope life might improve for her sisters.

But the marriage appeared to make matters worse, with the wedding degenerating into a major family drama and her father telling a relative he would have killed her if he was not away on business, Hyderi said. The marriage was annulled the next day.

"She said dear uncle, there was a lot of cruelty toward me," Latif Hyderi testified through an interpreter. "The only reason that I'm marrying in order to get the revenge of the cruelty to which I suffer from my father ... I would like to sacrifice myself for my sisters ... at least that my other sisters will get their freedom after me," he quoted Zainab as saying.

Hyderi said he appealed to Hamed, who court heard took on his father's role at home when his dad was away on business, to ease the pressure on the girls.

"They're like political prisoners," Hyderi said he told Hamed. "They go to school and brought back at home. They don't have permission to watch TV, they don't have permission to go to a party ... this is completely against humanity."http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/news/national/article/167589--montreal-family-s-trial-hears-potentially-incriminating-wiretaps

Tundratot

November 11th, 2011, 09:42 PM

Their words on the wire tap are pretty incriminating. I don't know how they can refute them. Combined with the fact that only members of the family that were in poor standing with the father are dead, no one the father gave a rat shit about, it's damning. But I still would like to see a map of the lock with the drive path or a re-enactment of the theory of the crime.

VXIII

November 12th, 2011, 01:41 AM

I would too, I dont get how they dont bug cars and homes more often when someone is suspected of a crime, seems reasonable to me... I guess in some cases words could be misconstrued but these people are clearly stating what they did...

Whisper

November 15th, 2011, 12:04 AM

WIRE TAP TESTIMONY:Some dramatic evidence was introduced today at the Shafia Murder Trial in Kingston.

"THE WIRE TAP RECORDINGS WERE SO DISTURBING SO VILE THAT MEMBERS OF THE COURTROOM GALLERY COULD BE HEARD GASPING AS MOHAMMEDS VOICE IS PLAYED WHERE HE'S TALKING ABOUT THE REASONS AS TO WHY HIS DAUGHTERS HAD TO DIE AND HOW THEY WERE A DISHONOUR TO HIS FAMILY."
SECRET LISTENING DEVICES WERE PLACED IN THE SHAFIA'S MINI VAN AND THEIR MONTREAL HOME.

HAMED'S CELL PHONE WAS BUGGED AS WELL.
THE SECRET POLICE RECORDINGS INTERCEPTED SOME RATHER DISTURBING CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN THE THREE ACCUSED IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP TO THEIR ARRESTS.
MOHAMMED SHAFIA CAN BE HEARD CURSING HIS THREE DECEASED TEENAGE DAUGHTERS.
"GOD'S CURSE ON THEM FOR GENERATION!
MAY THE DEVIL SHIT ON THEIR GRAVES. IS THAT WHAT A DAUGHTER SHOULD BE? WOULD A DAUGHTER BE SUCH A WHORE."
THE CROWN'S THEORY IS THAT THE THREE DAUGHTERS AND THEIR AUNT WERE VICTIMS OF AN HONOUR KILLING.
EVIDENCE PRESENTED AT THE TRIAL SUGGESTS THAT AFGHANI-BORN SHAFIA WAS UNHAPPY WITH HIS TEENAGE DAUGHTERS.
.... DISGUSTED THAT THEY HAD ADOPTED A WESTERN LIFESTYLE BY WEARING MAKE-UP AND HAVING BOYFRIENDS.
DURING ONE CONVERSATION IN THEIR BUGGED CAR, THE FAMILY PATRIARCH CAN BE HEARD DEFENDING HIS HONOUR -- WHILE DISCUSSING WITH HIS SON AND WIFE POSSIBLE PROOF POLICE MAY HAVE CONNECTING THEM TO THE DEATHS OF FAMILY MEMBERS.
"EVEN IF THEY HOIST ME UP ONTO THE GALLOWS, NOTHING IS MORE DEAR TO ME THAT MY HONOUR.
LET'S LEAVE OUR DESTINY TO GOD AND MAY GOD NEVER MAKE ME, YOU OR YOUR MOTHER HONOURLESS."
IN ANOTHER PRIVATE CONVERSATION ABOUT THE DEATHS OF HIS DAUGHTERS -- SHAFIA TELLS HIS SON :
"I AM HAPPY AND MY CONSCIENCE IS CLEAR.
THEY HAVEN'T DONE GOOD AND GOD PUNISHED THEM. "
AS THE TRANSLATED TAPES WERE PLAYED TO THE JURY, SHAFIA SOUNDED DEFIANT AND SHOWED NO REMORSE IN HIS MANY LECTURES TO HIS WIFE AND SON --OFTEN QUOTING RELIGION AND GOD.
THE RECORDINGS WERE MADE RIGHT UP UNTIL THE SHAFIAS WERE ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH MASS MURDER IN JULY OF 2009 -- LESS THAN A MONTH AFTER THE BODIES OF THE FOUR WOMEN WERE PULLED FROM A SUBMERGED CAR AT THE KINGSTON MILLS LOCKS.
"HAMED SHAFIA'S INTERROGATION TAPE FROM THE DAY HE WAS ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH FIRST DEGREE MURDER WAS PLAYED TO THE JUDGE AND JURY THIS AFTERNOON AND IT'S EXPECTED THAT THAT VIDEO WILL CONTINUE TOMORROW.
[..]
http://www.ckwstv.com/index.cfm?page=news&id=5936

I didnt make the font all in caps thats how its posted on site

Wiretaps record Shafia comparing daughter to ‘whore’
nov 14 2011

It’s a lesson of enormous gravity of which Mohammed Shafia reminds his son Hamed as they talk, the two of them, a police-planted bug recording every word they say, inside the family’s Pontiac Montana minivan
[...]
It’s close to midnight. “Be I dead or alive, nothing in the world is above (your) honour,”
Shafia says. “Isn’t that right, my son?”
An example of “nasty or dishonour,” he offers: If “your sister or my daughter or your mother’s daughter” is with a man that Sharia law forbids, anyone other than a father, brother, uncle or grandparents.
Prosecutors on Monday presented a flurry of wiretap evidence to the jury in the trial of Shafia, his wife and son, all charged with murder in the 2009 deaths.
The wiretaps, clandestinely placed on their phones, in the family’s home in Montreal’s Saint Leonard borough, in the van, in a police car taking them away after their arrests, captured not only Shafia’s absence of regret, but his vociferous animosity toward the girls, particularly Zainab.
They also captured Hamed’s middle-of-the-night telephone conversations with one of the other children in the family — who cannot be identified as per a court-ordered publication ban — seeking assurance from Hamed neither he nor their parents would kill themselves.
The prosecution contends the killings were based on the concept of honour, that this family, which hails from Afghanistan, was shamed by the rebellious western-cultural leanings of the eldest daughters. The defence suggests the car made its way into the canal by accident.
At one point in the conversations, Shafia, 58, tells his 41-year-old wife Tooba Yahya that they have done nothing as parents to deserve the behaviour of their daughters.
“May the devil sh-- on their graves!” he says. “Is that what a daughter should be? Would (a daughter) be such a whore?”
On July 20, he is continuing his arguments in the van. The girls “messed up . . . They were treacherous,” he tells his wife. “They betrayed both themselves and us.”
e compares them to prostitutes: “Like this woman standing on the side of the road and if you stop the car, she would go with you anywhere.”
He pleads with Yahya, that what’s happening “isn’t harder” than watching them with boyfriends.
“For this reason,” he says, whenever he sees their 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.’ That is how hurt I am.”
Tooba reminds him the girls said he was meddling in their affairs, which annoys him. “We used to admonish her not to hang around with boys . . . that wasn’t bad advice.” He’s talking about Zainab, who at one point had a Pakistani boyfriend.
Police also intercept a call to Hamed on July 20 from a Qatar Airways agent, to confirm Hamed’s flight to Dubai on July 22.
During that call, Hamed, 20, asks if it’s possible to leave the very next day.
Past 3 a.m. on July 22, Hamed speaks on the telephone to one of the other children, who is at another location. This child is worried about the events buffeting the family. “Hamed, should I kill myself Hamed?” the child asks in a quiet voice.
“Don’t do anything like that.”
In a follow-up call, the child seeks reassurance that Hamed, Shafia and Yahya won’t commit suicide. “Don’t do nothing stupid, okay?” the child implores. http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1086752--wiretaps-record-shafia-comparing-daughter-to-whore

Tundratot

November 15th, 2011, 12:28 AM

Was that a younger child? Perhaps a girl who was already thinking that her family was going to kill her for some imagined dishonor?

Whisper

November 15th, 2011, 01:16 AM

Was that a younger child? Perhaps a girl who was already thinking that her family was going to kill her for some imagined dishonor?
yeah a younger one not at the scene
I took it to mean the child thought the parent and Hamed were going to commit suicide
Prob some head game the three played with the kids trying to turn them against the 3 girls and Rona

Rockin Ma

November 15th, 2011, 07:54 AM

Tundratot

November 15th, 2011, 04:02 PM

So the woman with the girls was their aunt? Not wife? Why did they kill her though? And how do you move somewhere (in this case from Afghanistan to Canada) and expect the children not to adopt the customs and want to fit in? Why move at all if that is such a terrible thing? Should've stayed in his native land, but I suspect he'd have found a way to kill that particular daughter no matter what and perhaps these victims have a better chance at justice being tried in Canada rather than their native homeland where women don't matter as much.

Rona was the Shafi's first wife, and the family described her to authorities as a live-in cousin. Many Muslim/Arab societies prefer first cousin marriages, so saying she was an aunt wouldn't have been far wrong. I think their motives for killing her were that she was (1) barren, (2) unpopular with the second wife, (3) advocating for the girls, (4) wanting a divorce, all causing friction in the house. The second eldest daughter in the car, Sahar, was supposed "given" her to raise as her own.

As to moving, I guess money was more interesting than culture. Shafi wanted the economic opportunities here, for himself and his sons, but not to in any way allow his daughters or wives out from under his thumb.

Whisper

November 15th, 2011, 06:56 PM

Just a midday update from courtroom
Interrogation tapes continue at Shafia trial

KINGSTON, Ont. - A young man accused, along with his parents, of killing his three sisters told a police interrogator his mother had nothing to do with the deaths and that she had been talking about suicide, court heard Tuesday.

The jury in the murder trial watched a video of the interrogation of Hamed Shafia, 20, after he was arrested more than two years ago in the deaths of his sisters and one of his father's two wives in a polygamous marriage.

[...]
The police officers who took turns interrogating Hamed press him on inconsistencies in his story. He mostly sticks to the story he and his parents originally told police — that they had no idea what happened and the car ending up in the canal must have been a terrible accident.

But at one point, Det.-Const. Steve Koopman tells Hamed they can place him at the scene, and asks, "Did you mean to get involved with this?"

"No," Hamed replies, hanging his head.

He asks about his mother and says she has not been doing well since the deaths and has even talked about suicide.

"My mom, she doesn't have anything to do with it," Hamed says. "I told you before. she's 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."

She took some pills and fell asleep, he adds.

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

For the rest of the interview Hamed asserts his innocence and presses the police officers to disclose what evidence they have against him so he can clear up any "misunderstandings." But the officers point out that he cannot explain why pieces of a headlight of the family's Lexus SUV, which Hamed said he was driving that night, ended up at the scene.

The Crown alleges the accused used the Lexus to push the other car into the water with the four victims inside.

The jury has previously watched the interrogations of Yahya and Shafia. During Yahya's six-hour interrogation, she admits that the three of them were at the scene that night, but that she fainted and didn't know what happened
[...]http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/interrogation-tapes-continue-at-shafia-trial

Whisper

November 15th, 2011, 06:59 PM

I really wish they would get to whether the women were drugged or knocked out or what b/c they drowned so what caused them to not escape
Cops said they didnt even attempt to escape so has to be a reason,I know they said a couple had blunt force trauma

Maybe they were drugged with moms pills?

Dakota Valkyrie

November 15th, 2011, 07:24 PM

Backing up a little to the wiretap tapes played yesterday:

A Montreal man charged with killing his three daughters cursed them as "treacherous" for having boyfriends and said even if they came back to life 100 times he would "do the same again," court heard Monday.

"Even if, God forbid, they hoist us onto the gallows ... we accept it wholeheartedly," Mohammad Shafia is heard telling his wife and son on a police intercept one day before the three were arrested.
[...]Most of the rest is in the article Whisper put up earlier: http://www.sasklifestyles.com/article/GB/20111114/CP02/311149915/-1/estlifestyles/man-accused-of-killing-daughters-cursed-them-as-treacherous-court&template=cpArt

This man thinks he's above everything and everyone. I hope he finds himself on the bottom of the food chain in prison.

Whisper

November 15th, 2011, 11:09 PM

Blatchford: Brother accused in honour killing keen to see pictures of dead sisters

KINGSTON, Ont. — 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.

Yeah," Boyles said, "they only have pictures of two."

Boyles was the second investigator to have a go at the young man on July 22, 2009, the day that Hamed, his 41-year-old mother Tooba Mohammad Yahya and his 58-year-old father Mohammad Shafia were arrested and charged with four counts each of first-degree murder.
The lengthy video of that interview was played Tuesday before Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and the jury presiding over the trio's trial, where they are all pleading not guilty.
Det. Steve Koopman preceded Boyles — police thought he might form a bit of a bond with the young man, with whom he had dealt earlier in the investigation. Koopman was meant to be the soft touch; Boyles, a strapping fellow, was meant to be more confrontational.

Between them, they tried every trick in the interrogators' book: solicitousness, culturally appropriate pleas (the family is Afghan, so in this case that meant nods to honour and protestations of respect), the careful laying out of some of the mound of evidence police had gathered, confrontation, expressions of disappointment, anger and finally shock tactics (such as when Boyles showed the dead girls' pictures and later played a video excerpt of Yahya admitting the three had been at the crime scene).

The detectives turned themselves inside out to no avail: the young man before them was made of granite. He would not be moved from his story, even as one or another of the officers offered evidence disproving his most blatant lies.

Boyles' last big card was the video excerpt of Yahya's brief admission that she, her husband and son had been at the locks that night and had even heard a splash. The admission had come that same night, and several times Boyles deked out of the room to see if the clip was ready to be played.

Once, as he was about to leave, Hamed asked, "if I can look at it once again?" He meant the pictures of the bodies.
"No," Boyles replied.

"No," Hamed repeated, then, "I just have a look at this? I didn't catch your name either . . ." Boyles repeated his name.

"OK," Hamed said. "Can I see it, my files (the pictures)?" When Boyles returned, he had another picture with him. "Sorry Hamed," he said. "This was the one you wanted to see?"
"Yeah," he said.

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."

[...]http://www.canada.com/Blatchford+Brother+accused+honour+killing+keen+pic tures+dead+sisters/5715761/story.html#ixzz1dpltWny8

VXIII

November 16th, 2011, 03:18 AM

Rona was the Shafi's first wife, and the family described her to authorities as a live-in cousin. Many Muslim/Arab societies prefer first cousin marriages, so saying she was an aunt wouldn't have been far wrong. I think their motives for killing her were that she was (1) barren, (2) unpopular with the second wife, (3) advocating for the girls, (4) wanting a divorce, all causing friction in the house. The second eldest daughter in the car, Sahar, was supposed "given" her to raise as her own.

As to moving, I guess money was more interesting than culture. Shafi wanted the economic opportunities here, for himself and his sons, but not to in any way allow his daughters or wives out from under his thumb.

"My mom, she doesn't have anything to do with it," Hamed says. "I told you before. she's 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."

If she was really not there and drugged that night as her son claims, then she sure know what was going on according to what she was saying on the tapes: She says:

That night there was no electricity there," Shafia says. "It was pitch darkness. You remember, Tooba?"

"Yes," she replies.

AND:

“There was no camera, they’re lying,” Yahya is heard saying inside the van, after the trio left Kingston to head back to Montreal. “There was no camera. If there had been a camera, they would have taken that out first thing on the very first day.”

Later, Yahya adds: “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, all three of us would have been recorded.”

She knew exactly what was going on and the dirty whore helped murder her own beautiful daughters... (Technically isnt sToopa Yayha just a lowly concubine really, isnt the 2nd wife always the concubine?)

Tundratot

November 16th, 2011, 04:54 AM

She knew exactly what was going on and the dirty whore helped murder her own beautiful daughters... (Technically isnt sToopa Yayha just a lowly concubine really, isnt the 2nd wife always the concubine?)

No, I believe in Islamic countries there's no problem with up to four wives at a time -- any other women around the harem would be concubines. Under Western laws, though, Tooba would be a victim of a bigamous man with no legal standing as a wife.

Whisper

November 16th, 2011, 01:28 PM

This again is the woman whose column I follow I like how she just puts it out there
but here the end of the same conversation between Hamed and the younger sibling
In the one conversation yesterday Hamed seems to insinuate the mom considered suicide and the younger one was worried about that

In this version its like the younger un named one thinks everyone should committ suicide together

Shafia conversations show little remorse, lots of rage

[...]
Hamed chipped in with the bottom line: "The important thing is that they are away from these friends and stay away from such friends."

The wiretaps also reveal the breadth of the strange dysfunction of this family, who physically left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived abroad for years before coming to Canada in 2007, but who spiritually never really left Kabul far behind.

The day before the trio were arrested, one of the siblings phoned Hamed about 3 a.m. one morning.

In that whispered, desperate conversation, Hamed tried to tell the other children that the end might be approaching.

The sibling's answer? "If nothing happens, the best thing is everyone suicide."
http://www.windsorstar.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Shafia+conversations+show+little+remorse+lots+rage/5710805/story.html#ixzz1dtGWWFWX

Those younger ones that werent even there seem to have known more then what I really thought they did

VXIII

November 16th, 2011, 02:06 PM

I agree Whisper, seems the entire family knew and it appears as though the Parents and hamed are using this as a warning as well as a threat to keep the kids in line, thats so evil, can you imagine living under that knowledge and threat that this may happen to them if they decide to watch TV... Thanks again for all your research on this case and updating daily (as well as several other cases you update) ... :wavey: I know everyone following this case appreciates it greatly...

One thing I havent heard yet is curses and name calling against Rona in the tapes, Shafia calls his daughters whores, prostitutes and disgraceful, but Rona, seems like she was merely murdered to get rid of her, as an inconvenience :vollkommenauf: :crying: Or maybe to keep her from turning them in, Dont think she would have been able to not go to police... From all reports about her she loved those girls deeply...

Whisper

November 16th, 2011, 08:44 PM

Still waiting for updates from today nothing released yet

Immovable suspect keen to see photos of dead sisters
Read more: http://www.windsorstar.com/Immovable+suspect+keen+photos+dead+sisters/5716922/story.html#ixzz1duzwzYNz
More of the brother asking stupid questions while being interrogated

Hamed Shafia denied being at death scene, videotape shows
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Hamed+Shafia+denied+being+death+scene+videotape+sh ows/5713785/story.html#ixzz1dv0eO0xU

'I would do it again 100 times': Muslim father 'murdered his THREE daughters in honour killing for dating wrong boys'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061842/Mohammad-Shafia-murdered-daughter-honour-killing-said-hed-again.html#ixzz1dv2O8Yo7

Whisper

November 16th, 2011, 08:48 PM

The family was returning from a trip to Niagara Falls when it ended up in the canal and all the victims were found to have drowned.
However, prosecutors don't know if it was in the canal or elsewhere. Three of them had bruising to the back of their heads.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2061842/Mohammad-Shafia-murdered-daughter-honour-killing-said-hed-again.html#ixzz1dv35ic5m

That may answer a couple questions,
I wonder if they were drowned in the motel room or someplace else and the bruising was from being held under water??

Whisper

November 16th, 2011, 09:20 PM

K just when I think I have it brainiac speaks about chlorinated water being in the lungs
but they havent said anything
I am just guessing on how they may have been drowned then put in the car

Whisper

November 16th, 2011, 10:35 PM

The Deadly Mindset Behind "Honour Killings
And when the girl-child buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed. (Quran 81:8)"

This verse from the Quran seems to be the most appropriate for this story. A man, along with his (second) wife and son, stands accused of orchestrating the murders of his three daughters and a first wife (who could not bear children, hence the second wife).

In the early hours of June 30, 2009, a woman of Afghan background dared to do the unthinkable: learn how to drive. You know what I'm talking about: the moment for most young people when they finally get to be in control of something that's for all intents and purposes a big deal, for once in their life.

This is not a story from Kabul, Afghanistan where the family originates. This is a story from Kingston, Ontario -- home to the Royal Military College campus, Canadian Forces Base Kingston and even the Kingston Penitentiary that may well become the new home of the family members accused in this alleged case of honour killings in Canada.

Evidence in this case is still emerging as the trial continues, but quite a bit of information (not evidence) is already available through the initial coverage of this case in mid 2009. The Crown's allegation is that the father had begun to perceive the liberal attitudes taken by four women constituted an egregious display of immorality and as such, warranted their death. Keep in mind, he had been in Canada for a whole two years, having come from a place, which is for all intents and purposes, a failing state.

Recently, we have heard allegations in court that the father, in collaboration and conspiracy with the mother and son, orchestrated this killing to reclaim this supposed lost honour by having young girls who might have become rebellious.

"What will people say" is another major problem in such a mindset: If someone in the community just whispers that the girls have done something wrong (to us it would be small, to this mindset, anything is a trigger: Facebook, text messaging, you name it), they are guilty until proven innocent. Was this proof for the father that the girls had been corrupted by the West? Generally speaking, learning to drive would only give them the opportunity to have free sex, which surely would be the next step (is how the thinking goes in this Old World mentality). This is why women are practically locked up so as to "save" them from themselves (yes, it's always her fault).

Honour killings are not exclusive to Muslims; hardline Sikhs, Hindus and Christian Arabs are notorious for them also for not cooperating with arranged marriages or otherwise exerting inklings of feminine self. The overwhelming majority of honour killings and FGM that occur in Muslim societies do so in the harsh and austere environments, which constitutes much of the geography of places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and North Africa. This if of course, not to say, "the desert made 'em do it" but to note the environment in which the Quranic verse was first revealed and the kind of mindsets it tries to correct.

Girls being buried alive still happens in India (mostly Hindus) due to male gender preference (to do the farming of course) and modern female infanticide is manifested by using ultrasound to find out gender early so that if it's a girl, the fetus can be aborted (China). I would qualify this as another form of "honour killing" not because I believe conception equals life (I do not), but ending the life of a female child because of gender or imagined immorality that supposedly comes with it.

This anti-female child attitude is condemned in another verse also:
When news is brought to one of them, of (the birth of) a female (child), his face darkens, and he is filled with inward grief! With shame does he hide himself from his people, because of the bad news he has had! Shall he retain it on contempt, or bury it in the dust? Ah! what an evil (choice) they decide on? (16:57-58)

In the end, child or adult femalicide (yes, it's a real word) is among the pre-Islamic practices that are expressly prohibited, lacking honour completely and subject to findings of guilt by God.[...]http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mubin-shaikh/honour-killings_b_1028380.html

Rockin Ma

November 17th, 2011, 07:42 AM

hardline Sikhs

Well that's surprising news I will need to follow up on.

Whisper

November 17th, 2011, 01:54 PM

well that's surprising news i will need to follow up on.

they are fucking barbaRians the way they think

Whisper

November 17th, 2011, 11:51 PM

The young Montreal man accused of killing three of his sisters and his stepmother, in a conspiracy with his mother and father, insisted, during a four-hour police interrogation, that he was never at the canal where the victims were found dead in a submerged car. Hamed Shafia, now 20, held to the denial, even when confronted with the fact that his mother had told police, in a separate interrogation, that the three were present when the family’s Nissan Sentra plunged into the water.
Hamed Shafia is interrogated on July 22, 2009, by Kingston police officer Steve Koopman. The interrogation was videotaped. (screen capture from released exhibit)
“It’s impossible, you’re making it up,” Hamed said, when Sgt. Michael Boyles, the Kingston Police officer questioning him, told him what his mother had said. A videotape of the interrogation by Boyles, and another officer, was played for jurors Tuesday at the murder trial.

[...]
Hamed told the officer he didn’t believe his mother would say all three were at the scene.

“Well, if she was there, I don’t know, but I wasn’t,” he said.
“She said you were there,” Boyles responded.
Uh, that’s impossible,” Hamed said.
Prosecutors allege that the three family members were involved in taking their two vehicles to the canal at around 1:30 in the morning on June 30 and using their SUV to push the smaller car, containing the four victims, over a stone ledge into the water.

Boyles brought a laptop computer into the interview room and played a portion of the videotaped interrogation of Hamed’s mother.

After Hamed watched his mother’s incriminating statement, Boyles told him that his mother told them what happened “because it’s the right thing to do.”
Hamed appeared surprised by what he had seen.

So is your mother lying?” Boyles asked.

“I don’t know … speak to the lawyer,” Hamed mumbled.

Earlier, another officer, Det. Steve Koopman appeared to come close to wresting admissions from the young man.

“Did your dad always have this [murder] plan in effect in regards to the Kingston Mills area?” Koopman asked.

“No,” Hamed replied.

“OK. When did it get brought up to you?”
“No, he didn’t, he didn’t bring it up to me,” Hamed said. When Koopman asked how the two family cars ended up at the canal, Hamed changed the subject.

“Is my mom in one of the cells?” he asked the officer.

In another segment, Koopman gently suggests that Hamed is less culpable than his father.

“Did you mean to get involved in this?” Koopman asked.
“No,” Hamed responded.

“When did it start for you?”
Hamed refused to answer the officer’s next few questions and he seemed intent on absolving his mother of blame.
“My mom, she doesn’t … have anything to do with it,” he said.

When the officer asked how his mother was doing, Hamed said “she did talk about suicide.”

During the interrogation, officers also revealed to Hamed that cellphone records showed that his phone was in the Kingston area three days before the victims were found, at a time when he had already said he was in Niagara Falls with his family on a vacation.

“I don’t know; I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hamed replied, when asked why his phone was using a cell tower in the Kingston area.
The young man is withdrawn and uncommunicative through large stretches of the interrogation, but at other times he engages with the police officers and quizzes them about what evidence they have collected to implicate the family.

Koopman tried to show empathy, telling Hamed he knew it was a scary experience.

“But I think you’re doing a dishonour to yourself and you’re doing a dishonour to your family when you’re gonna lie about what your responsibility is,” the officer said.
“How much I knew, I told you and if you want me to start lying, then that’s a different story, you know, anyway, I have nothing left in my life you know,” Hamed responds. “It’s like, God forbid for any family but uh, four members suddenly just disappear, like gone.”

Prosecutors allege the victims died in an honour killing, an ancient cultural practice that is still prevalent in some South Asian and Middle Eastern cultures in which girls and women can be murdered if they are perceived to have shamed a family through immoral behaviour or misconduct.
The Shafia family, originally from Afghanistan, came to Canada in 2007 from Dubai and settled in St. Leonard
[..]http://www.cancrime.com/2011/11/17/i-wasnt-there-accused-brother-in-honour-killing-told-police/

VXIII

November 18th, 2011, 01:06 PM

So, it appears they most likely drowned them in a pool or hot tub first because of the chorine in their lungs? Mr. Shafia stated :
EVEN IF THEY HOIST ME UP ONTO THE GALLOWS, NOTHING IS MORE DEAR TO ME THAN MY HONOUR.
LET'S LEAVE OUR DESTINY TO GOD AND MAY GOD NEVER MAKE ME, YOU OR YOUR MOTHER HONOURLESS."

Do ya think you might have lost your precious honor when you murdered your first wife and children dumbfucks?

and:

"Even if, God forbid, they hoist us onto the gallows ... we accept it wholeheartedly," Wonder is Toobastupa and Hamed feel the same way :hmmmm2:

Think he will still feel the same way and do it 100 times over
I say to myself, ‘You did well. Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again.’ He doesnt even feel any remorse that sTooba and Hamed are also going to suffer the same fate... Wonder if it ever crossed Stoobias mind "hey, if he is killing Rona, what will he do to me when I become old and cant have babies anymore"...

Dont know if Canada hangs people but if they do, give this man the short drop (the really short one where your toes are just inches from the ground) and make him die slowly, let his feet touch the ground too a few times and hoist him up again since he says hed do it 100 times over... The murders of Rona, Zainab and Safar are reprehensible enough without killing young Geeti, that just gets to me and keeps me awake at night she was a 13 year old child and she knew what was coming... :crying: what bad could she have done?

P.S. Maybe its not being reported on but I dont see any isnlamic protesters rushing to their aid...

Whisper

November 18th, 2011, 01:40 PM

So, it appears they most likely drowned them in a pool or hot tub first because of the chorine in their lungs?

No they havent said that yet
I said the othernight to my husband that maybe they were drowned before they were put in the car b/c they died by drowning and have bruising to the back of the head/neck
So I thought maybe from being held down when Shafia was pissed off
I can see him angrily doing it

But my husband said it would be chlorinated watrer in the lungs then so thats what Im waiting for
B/c Shafia wouldnt think of that hes a fucking neaderthal,cant see him drowing them in a lake first

Whisper

November 18th, 2011, 08:47 PM

Shafia trial hears recording by 'translator' turned investigator

KINGSTON, Ont. — The wonder is that Moosa Hadi managed to get to and from the witness stand without injury from the weight of the axe he has to grind.
Hadi is the self-appointed "investigator" who first offered his services as a translator to the defence team representing Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their eldest son Hamed after their arrests in the drowning deaths of four of their family members made headlines about two years ago.
[...]
Shortly after being hired, however, and without the lawyers' knowledge, Hadi had morphed into the Afghan version of the fictional French detective Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the bumbling character famously played by the late Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther series.
If he was a not entirely unreasonable choice as a translator — like the Shafia parents, Hadi was born in Afghanistan and like them, speaks Farsi — only a film director with a sly sense of humour, like Blake Edwards, would have drafted him as a detective.
Hadi, now about 30, was at the time a second-year mining engineering student. He has had no training in investigations and, as his testimony revealed, no clue how to conduct one. He's also a bit of an odd duck, prickly and terribly serious about his investigative duties, and with a bewildering self-confidence.
Though Peter Kemp and David Crowe, who respectively represent the 58-year-old Shafia and the 41-year-old Yahya, hired Hadi, it was purely as a translator.
He didn't tell them what he was doing in his investigation, though Kemp, the lawyer who seems to have been most involved with him, might have put his mind to why a simple translator, let alone this one, needed to have every lick of evidence in the case.
In any case, Hadi duly signed confidentiality agreements with the two lawyers and then proceeded to blithely ignore them. He cheerily nodded in agreement when Crowe in cross-examination said mildly, "You decided the search for the truth was more important?"
Having received a hard drive of Crown disclosure — which included all the evidence Kingston Police had obtained against the trio to that point, including wiretaps and witness interviews — Hadi then got for himself special "professional visit" status at the Quinte Detention Centre, where Shafia and Hamed were being held.
He duly visited Shafia, immediately pronounced him a deeply religious man who was wholly innocent, and the two struck a deal that Hadi would "investigate about the case" for which he was paid a total of $4,500.
In other words, on one level, he was working for Kemp and Crowe, as a translator. On another, unknown to the two lawyers, he was working for Shafia and blossoming into Insp. Clouseau — visiting the scene at the Kingston Mills locks; meeting and talking to the family's surviving children ("I told them that yes, your parents are absolutely innocent"); once even travelling with a Shafia family relative, who was also his friend, to Toronto.
He was convinced, he said, that if anyone was hiding anything, it was Hamed, though Hadi was clear he knew straight off he was not the murderous "kind of guy."
Since first reporting their relatives "missing," the parents and son, now 20, had stuck ferociously to the story that the deaths must have been a terrible accident, likely caused when Zainab, their headstrong 19-year-old daughter, took the car out for a spin with her sisters, Sahar and Geeti, then 17 and 13, and their father's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, along for the ride.
But police had discovered pieces of a headlight from the family Lexus at the scene, though the accused threesome insisted neither they nor that car had ever been there; Hamed had reported an "accident" with the car, with a pole in a near-empty parking lot, the next morning in Montreal.
Back to Hadi, who got the disclosure on Oct. 6, 2009.

Exactly a month later, on Nov. 6, he went over it with Hamed at the detention centre, and by God if Hamed didn't make a clean breast of it that very night in a story which, as Hadi inimitably put it, "was matching all existing evidences."
The next day, Hadi returned to the detention centre to record the story.
It was that recording, with Hadi in the stand, that Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and the jurors heard Friday.
In the revised version, Hamed said the women had been talking about going for a spin to find an open gas station, and after urging them not to go, they went out in the Nissan anyway, and he decided to follow them, always intending to safely see them back to the motel where they were staying.
But they got lost, he was following too closely, and hit the Nissan, shattering the headlight. As he got out to inspect the damage, the tragic accident happened — he heard a splash and saw the Nissan in the water.
His efforts to help them consisted of tooting the horn once and dangling a rope in the water. He told Hadi he was too scared to tell his parents (his father would swear and be upset, he said) or call the police (they would blame him for letting Zainab drive without a licence), so he did what any boy in that dire circumstance would do — he left his sisters in the water and drove to Montreal, where, the next morning, he staged the accident in the parking lot to account for the damage to the Lexus.
Toward the end of the audio recording, Hadi, who listened to the sound of his own voice with delight, said to Hamed, "if I didn't get involved in this, how long do you think (it would have been until) you would hold the truth?"
"OK," Hadi pronounced, "for now, you are not guilty in my eyes, I mean not guilty of murder." His transition from detective to judge was complete.That was Nov. 7, 2009. Five days later, he sent police the audio of the interview and the first of two "reports" he also wrote on his investigation.
It is of some comfort that Hadi is now working in Thompson, Man., where the temperature is about -18 C.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada/Shafia+trial+hears+recording+translator+turned+inv estigator/5735029/story.html

what a clown

Whisper

November 21st, 2011, 09:12 PM

Romeo-and-Juliet marriage lasted one day, ‘honour killings’ trial told
Nov 21 2011

In poignant testimony that went to the heart of the prosecution case against three people accused of committing multiple “honour killings,” the former boyfriend of one of the victims told of a clandestine, Romeo-and-Juliet romance and a marriage in Montreal that lasted just one day – destroyed by her parents’ disapproval.
The witness, whose name is under a temporary publication ban, told the murder trial of Afghan-Canadian businessman Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their 20-year-old son Hamed that he first began courting the couple’s eldest daughter, Zainab, in February, 2008.

And it was evident from the outset, he said, that Hamed and the parents were implacably opposed to the relationship.

He recounted an e-mail he received from Zainab in which she warned him to beware of her brother.

[...]

In earlier evidence Monday, the jury saw revealing photographs of the two oldest sisters, scantily clad in lingerie and swimsuits, found on their cellphones after their bodies were discovered. Pictures of their boyfriends were also discovered, and printed copies of some of the photos were later found among the property of the accused – in the Lexus and in a suitcase belonging to Hamed Shafia.

All four women drowned, autopsies showed, but where and when has never been clear. Three of the victims had fresh bruises on their heads, and one of the car windows was wide open, leading police to believe they were dead before the Nissan plunged into the water.
Zainab’s former boyfriend told the trial Monday he and she were high-school sweethearts and that their relationship was under pressure from the beginning from her family, who disapproved of his social standing and Pakistani heritage.

He once visited her at her Montreal family home, he told the trial, but had to be hustled out to the garage when her brother Hamed unexpectedly showed up.

But Hamed found him lurking there and sent him away. After that, Zainab was not allowed to leave the house, even to attend school, for months.

She and the boyfriend nonetheless stayed in touch, and finally in April, 2009, he helped Zainab move to a women’s shelter in Montreal. She stayed there for two weeks but was persuaded by her mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, to move back home, on the day that her father returned to Canada from one of his many business trips abroad.

Seemingly the mother was now on her daughter’s side, and in May, 2009 – five weeks before the four victims perished – the two young people took Islamic wedding vows in a Montreal mosque.

But the wedding was never registered with Quebec authorities, and one day later, during what was supposed to be a celebration in a restaurant, it was dissolved by the same imam who had performed it. This was done by Zainab’s husband pronouncing, “I divorce you” three times.

The marriage ended because no one from the groom’s family showed up, the former boyfriend told the trial, and his new wife’s family had reverted to their former hostility.

Zainab was heartbroken, he said, and he recounted her tearfully telling him why she had to change her mind: “I cannot do this. I cannot leave my family and ruin their reputation.”

Two weeks later, she sent him another clandestine, abbreviation-filled e-mail, in which she wrote: “One thing that I’m really happy about is that it was my dream to marry u n I did it … we had an amazing love story together … ur wife and best friend Zainab.”

The Shafias have three other children, who were placed in care after their parents’ arrest. All seven siblings were the biological children of Tooba Mohammad Yahya.

The witness will be cross-examined by the defence when the trial resumes Tuesday morning.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/revealing-photos-of-victims-found-on-cellphones-honour-killings-trial-told/article2243647/?from=sec431

Whisper

November 21st, 2011, 09:13 PM

Valentine prompted friendship rules, Shafia trial hears

KINGSTON, ONT. - A young man told court Monday how he sent Zainab Shafia a Valentine’s Day card at high school in 2008 -- and got the "rules of friendship" along with a thank you in response.

The rules outlined how to avoid the scrutiny of her younger brother, Hamed.
[,,,]http://www.torontosun.com/2011/11/21/valentine-prompted-friendship-rules-shafia-trial-hears

Whisper

November 21st, 2011, 09:21 PM

But the wedding was never registered with Quebec authorities, and one day later, during what was supposed to be a celebration in a restaurant, it was dissolved by the same imam who had performed it. This was done by Zainab’s husband pronouncing, “I divorce you” three times.

at the risk of being attacked,
this is the shit that pisses me off when they come here and decide their laws and whatever apply here
If they want them to be binding here then so should be the right to sentence them under Sharia law
and others used in sentencing in their countries

preferably buried up to their waists and stoned
JMHO

Tundratot

November 21st, 2011, 09:32 PM

The picture I'm getting is that the 3 murderous family members hit the women over the head, knocking them unconscious and then let them drown when the car went down. I'm curious about the fourth woman -- who did not have bruises on her head -- and what happened there. Was she drugged, a deep sleeper, or just compliant and allowing herself to be killed? And was it Geeti?

Whisper

November 22nd, 2011, 05:25 PM

Life in Shafia home was improving: boyfriend

KINGSTON, Ont. - Life was starting to improve in the Shafia household in the days before three sisters and one of two wives were allegedly killed by their family, with the eldest daughter being granted minor freedoms, court heard Tuesday.

Zainab Shafia, 19, told her boyfriend in late June 2009 that her father forgave her for a one-day marriage and even let her get a part-time job at Harvey's and leave a French school — she didn't speak the language — and return to her English school, the boyfriend testified.

Just days later, on June 30, Zainab, her sisters Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and one of her father's wives in a polygamous marriage, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were found dead in a submerged car at the bottom of the Rideau Canal in Kingston, Ont.

[...]
Court has heard that Shafia called a relative to say he wanted to kill Zainab because she was going to the library, going online, hanging out with friends and dating. Ammar Wahid told court that when he and Zainab started their relationship, after he sent her a Valentine's Day card in 2008, she warned him to stay away from her brother.

"Be aware of my bro," she wrote him in an email. "If sometimes wanna talk come in the library. And if my bro is around act like complete stranger...I (don't) want to give him the slightest idea that we (are) friends."

About a month after they started dating in secret Zainab invited Wahid over to the family house when her parents were out. But Hamed found out and asked him to leave. He was polite about it, Wahid testified, but after that incident the family pulled Zainab out of school for several months in which she was barely allowed to leave her room.

[...]
But the hastily arranged wedding, which took place in mid-May while Shafia was in Dubai on business, was a disaster, court has heard. No one from Wahid's family attended, and a Shafia family drama culminated in Yahya fainting and crying. Zainab's mother and brother convinced Zainab to end the marriage for the sake of her family, Wahid said. They divorced the next day.

"Obviously we loved each other, so it hurt both of us," Wahid told court Tuesday.

Emails from Zainab, entered as court exhibits, from June make it clear she still cared deeply for Wahid, ending one note with the signoff "ur wife...and best friend Zainab."

"One thing (I'm) really happy about is that it was my dream to marry u (and) I did it once," she wrote on June 2. "Even one day if (something) happens to us like dead I (won't) die with out my dream being full filled...We had an amazing love story 2gether."

Later that month, when Shafia returned home from Dubai, he said he forgave her for marrying Wahid and even let her get a job and go back to her own school, Wahid said. But the Crown alleges that at the same time Shafia was plotting to kill Zainab, and trying to recruit relatives to help.

It was also around that time that someone was conducting Internet searches on a computer used mostly by Hamed such as "where to commit a murder" and "can a prisoner have rights to sell his real estate."
http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/life-in-shafia-home-was-improving-boyfriend

Whisper

November 22nd, 2011, 06:36 PM

http://i44.tinypic.com/35c4vm9.jpg

Kingston murder trial jurors heard details Monday about how the relationship between Zainab Shafia and her Pakistani boyfriend caused a great deal of stress within her family.[...]http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/cbc-article.aspx?cp-documentid=31450916

Whisper

November 22nd, 2011, 09:05 PM

Court hears Zainab Shafia's 911 call

KINGSTON, ONT. - Defence lawyers in the Shafia murder trial painted a different picture of the relationship between Zainab Shafia and the young man who was married to her for a day in 2009, just weeks before she died.
Court heard an audio recording Tuesday of a 911 call the young woman made to Montreal police on June 5, 2009, complaining that her ex-husband, Ammar Wahid, had threatened to kidnap her “or something.”
“Since, like, uh, I found out he has a fiancee and I’m thinking, like, that’s cheating on me and stuff and so he got all pissed and everything so now he’s, like, um, you know, calling my house,” Zainab tells the 911 operator.
Less than four weeks later, Zainab’s body, along with those of her two sisters and their “aunt” were found in a car in the Rideau Canal at the Kingston Mills locks station.
Zainab’s brother, Hamed, and her parents, Mohammad Shafia and Tooba Mohammad Yahya, are each charged with first-degree murder.
The Crown alleges the women, ranging in age from 13 to 53, were killed to preserve the honour of the Shafia family.
Wahid told the court that Zainab’s parents were upset that their daughter wanted to marry someone of Pakistani descent.
Defence lawyer Patrick McCann, who represents Hamed, suggested Zainab’s parents disapproved of Wahid’s criminal record.
They’re not going to be choosing a guy with criminal convictions, with no money and no job,” McCann suggested.
Wahid maintained it was a cultural divide that created the resistance to the marriage, even within his own family.
[...]http://www.torontosun.com/2011/11/22/court-hears-zainab-shafias-911-call

http://i41.tinypic.com/25hk9yg.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/mcsy7t.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/23lkqo8.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/2dtu1xj.jpg

Whisper

November 22nd, 2011, 09:06 PM

Photos of Zainab Shafia that were found on her cellphone, which was recovered from the car submerged in the Rideau Canal and containing the bodies of her, her sisters Sahar and Geeti, and her “aunt” Rona Amir Mohammad, were shown at the murder trial at Frontenac County Court House in Kingston, Ont., Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Photo courtesy Kingston Police.;

'I love u much': Shafia murder trial hears emails from drowned daughter http://www.canada.com/news/love+much+Shafia+murder+trial+hears+emails+from+dr owned+daughter/5744835/story.html#ixzz1eUDqLqzO

Whisper

November 22nd, 2011, 09:21 PM

You know if he hadnt murdered them we wouldnt be seeing the fucking pics he was so worried about

VXIII

November 23rd, 2011, 12:35 PM

I was hoping the boyfriend would testify... Our cultures really are different because had my little brother tried to order me around and ratted me out to my parents he would be paying for it very painfully...

Whisper

November 23rd, 2011, 07:41 PM

'Suicidal' Shafia daughter described by school official

School and youth protection officials tell a quadruple-murder trial in Kingston, Ont., that the middle Shafia daughter thought of suicide, feared her parents and claimed they physically abused her.
[...]
All four victims were found in a submerged car at the bottom of the Rideau Canal in June 2009.
[...]
In their opening address to the jury last month, prosecutors detailed how staff at Sahar’s school twice called youth protection after hearing the girl speak about her home life.
On Wednesday, the school's vice-principal testified that in May 2008 Sahar, 16 at the time, said she had contemplated suicide, and that her mother didn't care.
Sahar also made other allegations of abuse and alienation from her family, and the vice-principal called youth services.
Batshaw Youth and Family Centres responded by sending social worker Jeanne Rowe, who also testified Wednesday.
Rowe told the court when she came to Sahar's Montreal school, Sahar was visibly upset, but said she didn't want Rowe to speak with her parents.
"She was very scared of her parents knowing about the report," said Rowe.
"She didn't explain to me why, just that she wanted to go home."
Rowe said Sahar then denied all the allegations the school had passed on to youth services.
According to the Crown, Rowe met with Sahar again two days later. The teen, now wearing the hijab she had before refused to don, said things had improved at home.
Rowe decided the initial complaint was founded, but it wasn’t necessary to remove Sahar from the home. A second complaint was made by school staff in June 2009. By that time, Sahar had a boyfriend her parents didn’t approve of, according to prosecutors.
She told staff she was afraid one of her siblings would tell her father, who was soon returning to Canada after a trip to Dubai, that she was seen at a restaurant with the boyfriend. She allegedly told staff she was afraid of her father’s return.
That report was made 25 days before the girls were found dead.
Police describe 911 call
On Tuesday afternoon, the court heard from a police officer who intervened at the Shafia home following a 911 call made about a month before the girls were found dead.
The officer described how the Shafia girls reported being hit in the face by their brother and father, and having their hair pulled because they were out late. The officer observed a mark around the eye of one of the girls.
That officer wanted to press charges, but called in youth protection services instead, who then interviewed all the girls in front of their father. The court was told the girls were crying and silent, but then recanted allegations of abuse, while still saying they wanted to live in a foster home.
Police and youth protection decided no charges would be laid and closed the filehttp://news.ca.msn.com/canada/suicidal-shafia-daughter-described-by-school-official

Whisper

November 23rd, 2011, 10:10 PM

Shelter workers, police give dramatic testimony about Shafia family

Two months before she and three relatives were allegedly killed by her father, mother and brother, a Montreal teenager fled her home for a women’s shelter where she described a pattern of domestic abuse, a murder trial was told Tuesday.

She spoke of psychological and physical violence, chiefly by her brother, and said she was afraid of him,” counsellor Jennifer Bumbray told the court, where Afghan-Canadian businessman Mohammad Shafia, 58, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their 20-year-old son, Hamed, each stand charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
A second counsellor at the Passages shelter, where 19-year-old Zainab Shafia stayed for about two weeks in April and May, 2009, said the same. “Zainab said her brother could be verbally aggressive and violent,” Rachel Laberge Malett told the trial.

That was not the only sign of trouble in the Shafia household. On the same day Zainab ran away, April 17, Montreal police Constable Anne-Marie Choquette told the trial in an agreed statement of facts that she was called to the family home on Bonnivet Street, in the borough of St. Leonard. Standing on the street nearby were four Shafia adolescents, including two sisters who would later be found drowned in a Kingston-area lock along with Zainab, and all were evidently in distress.

“Their mother was reported to be afraid because the oldest daughter Zainab had left the house and they did not know where she was,” Constable Choquette said in her statement. “The children were concerned about the reaction of the father to this information.”
[...]
When Zainab showed up at the women’s shelter, she had no money but she brought with her some expensive clothes and shoes. “She kind of stood out” compared to other residents, Ms. Bumbray told the jury. But in her intake interview, Zainab spoke not only of violence at home, but of being forced to leave school, of being sequestered in isolation from the rest of the household, and of staying in secret contact with her boyfriend via a clandestine cellphone.

Two weeks later, her mother Tooba persuaded her to return home.

The four Shafia siblings Constable Choquette encountered that same evening also appeared to be in great need. One had a bruise on her face, all spoke of violence in the home, and two of the girls who would later die, Sahar and Geeti, expressly stated they wanted to be removed.

A child-care worker also arrived that evening. But midway through the visit, the children’s father, Mohammad Shafia, came home and “the demeanour of the children changed,” Constable Choquette said. “After his arrival, the children stopped talking.” One of the girls then retracted her story.
[...]
But it was clear this was an unusual household. In particular, Det. Lefebvre noticed that Sahar, who was interviewed at school, not only seemed cheerful but wore stylish Western clothes and makeup, with no hijab – hardly the hallmark of a strict Islamic regimen. Sahar explained that whenever she arrived at school, and departed for home, she would change her clothes.

In earlier testimony Tuesday, the court also heard from Zainab’s former boyfriend, Ammar Wahid, who was very briefly her husband.

The pair married in a mosque after she left the women’s shelter, but the union was dissolved the next day, under pressure from the Shafia parents and Hamed, who during his father’s frequent business trips abroad took on the role of man of the house, even though he was younger than Zainab.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/shelter-workers-police-give-dramatic-testimony-about-shafia-family/article2244868/

Tundratot

November 24th, 2011, 02:37 AM

That officer wanted to press charges, but called in youth protection services instead, who then interviewed all the girls in front of their father. The court was told the girls were crying and silent, but then recanted allegations of abuse, while still saying they wanted to live in a foster home. This didn't seem like a problem? They were silent, denied abuse, but wanted a foster home!!! They may have mitigated their statements, but even in the presence of their father they wanted a foster home. They braved his possible retribution to say that much and those YPS people ignored it?!!!

Whisper

November 24th, 2011, 02:26 PM

This didn't seem like a problem? They were silent, denied abuse, but wanted a foster home!!! They may have mitigated their statements, but even in the presence of their father they wanted a foster home. They braved his possible retribution to say that much and those YPS people ignored it?!!!
I read the column in my paper lastnight and those kids were terrified of him and Hamed,
2 others that are still alive are the ones that recanted their stories that night
Im hoping they testify later on in the trial and arent afraid anymore

Whisper

November 24th, 2011, 06:24 PM

Shafia dad suggested daughters possibly drugged

The father accused in the Kingston, Ont., canal deaths told police in an interrogation video shown during his trial Thursday that he wondered if someone drugged or choked his daughters prior to their deaths.
Mohammad Shafia was interrogated a day after the bodies of his three daughters were found in June 2009.
Shafia told police in the video that his eldest daughter, Zainab, 19, took the car keys and went on a joyride and had a terrible accident. Weeks before he was arrested, Shafia was recorded telling police he didn't know how their car got in the water at the Kingston Mill Locks. "If someone drugged them or choked them, I want to know," Shafia told police.
"Up until the point the police told me, I wouldn't have even imagined this. I would have thought they went to Montreal," Shafia said.
[...]
The prosecution already told the court the autopsies revealed no signs of drugs in the victims' bodies. The autopsies would have been done at least 12 hours after the drownings.
Court hears from victims' teachers
Also on Thursday, the trial heard testimony from teachers at the Montreal high school attended by two of the victims.
Antonella Enea testified she taught Sahar for two years before the teen's death. Enea said Sahar confided in her, and the teacher told the court she twice called youth protection services.
Enea said the last call was made in June 2009 after Sahar said she was afraid because her father was returning from overseas, and one of her siblings was going to tell him she was "a whore."
The teacher testified she called youth protection officials and they advised her to locate a shelter in the community where Sahar could go if she needed to leave her home.
Youth protection services told Enea there was no social worker assigned to Sahar's case, even though a complaint was made a year before.
[...]http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/shafia-dad-suggested-daughters-possibly-drugged

Maybe we will soon find out why they didnt attempt to get out of the car

Whisper

November 24th, 2011, 07:00 PM

Canal Killing Trial: Suspect Observed Car with 4 Victims Sink
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/breakingnews/article_212390893.shtml?rssfeed

Whisper

November 24th, 2011, 08:47 PM

K Courts let out for the day
Shafia girl 'wished to be free,' teacher tells murder trial

http://i39.tinypic.com/u4pok.jpg

Sahar Shafia told a high-school teacher that she was treated harshly by her mother, her father and her brother Hamed.
KINGSTON, Ont. – Sahar Shafia, a Montreal teenager alleged to have been killed by her parents and her brother in June 2009, had confided to a high school mathematics teacher that life at home was “severe,” and she and her younger sister Geeti hoped to leave the house and live together, a murder trial was told Thursday morning.
Sahar is a girl who liked life. She wished to be free,” Fatiha Boualia testified in French, through an interpreter, at the trial of Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41; and their son Hamed Shafia, 20.
[...]
Boualia taught Sahar at École Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in St. Léonard in the 2008-09 academic year.
The teacher said Sahar had told her she was treated harshly by her mother, her father and her brother Hamed.
[..]
Boualia recounted an incident when Sahar fainted in class in May 2009. Boualia spent hours at the hospital with the girl because her parents could not be reached. None of the girl's family members came to the hospital.
Boualia said Sahar told her later that the girl believed a sibling had told her mother not to go to the hospital.
She was crying,” Boualia testified. “She said, ‘Ma’am, it’s always the fact (that others are) distancing people from me, that love me.’ ”
Sahar did not tell the teacher which person was trying to come between her and her family members. http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+girl+wished+free+teacher+tells+murder+trial/5761986/story.html#ixzz1efp9jv00

Whisper

November 24th, 2011, 08:50 PM

dupe

VXIII

November 24th, 2011, 09:56 PM

KINGSTON—It was a household of shifting alliances, duelling camps and cultivated snitches.

In a family of ten — one father, two wives, seven children — there were those who pleased, those out of favour and those who meddled. The dynamics of dysfunction may have made situational liars out of them all.

Four ended up dead: Sisters Zainab, Sahar, Geeti, and Rona Mohammad Amir, the barren first spouse.

Three – mom, dad, oldest son: Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Yahya, Hamed — are on trial for murder.

And three other siblings cannot be identified. They were minors in age, if not all minor players in the domestic melodramas that unfolded, and taken into care by child welfare authorities on the morning their parents were arrested, July 23, 2009.

The youngest of the Shafia progeny is the child her mother begged permission to see during a videotaped police interrogation. It was her photograph that Tooba held to her face, keening.

Two others, adolescents, have flitted spectrally through this trial, referenced primarily to illustrate the juxtaposition of sibling relationships. What’s emerged is the clear preeminence of boy children in this transplanted Afghan Muslim clan, how even the adults valued their word, trusted their counsel. In Afghan families, or at least this one, no brother was ever too young to belittle and bully a sister.

That leaves the one other offspring, an adolescent, who seems to have sailed through the traumas and tribulations that buffeted the family, unaffected by crises, obedient, an “exemplary” student. In the disposal of troublesome teenage daughters — as alleged by the prosecution, which has methodically constructed a case to support the theory of a mass “honour killing” — this girl got a pass.

She ruffled no feathers but was viewed suspiciously by Sahar.

The poignant, lonely life of 17-year-old Sahar is coming into stark relief in the courtroom here, a picture emerging of a teenager who paid dearly for her stubborn otherness, conduct so unbecoming that, as court as heard, she was sent to Coventry within their Montreal home. As Sahar revealed to her vice-principal, at one point there was an order issued that no one in the family should speak to her. The shunning “lasted a long time.”

Witnesses have been filling in what had been mostly a blank biographical canvas, with so much of the narrative thus far focused on the war that had raged between Zainab and the accused.

“She was sad, some days she was very sad,” said Antonella Enea, Sahar’s French teacher at the high school she attended and where she was often absent.

Enea recalled a conversation where the teacher had simply asked Sahar how she was faring. “Quite rapidly she opened up and talked about things. She spoke about problems she was experiencing at home, that no one spoke to her. She said she could not have the normal life of a young girl.”

Sahar, said Enea, doubted anyone could alleviate the situation. “She said that was the state of affairs at the house and nothing could be changed.”

Of the relationship between Sahar and her younger sister — the one who can’t be named, taught by Enea as well — the teacher said: “She told me (the sister) brought things into the house, saying that Sahar was talking to boys.”

The younger brother had also been speaking ill of Sahar to their parents. “She was afraid her brother was going to tell her father that she was a whore.”

Following another conversation with the teen, a year later, Enea suggested filing a complaint with youth protection officials because Sahar claimed she’d been physically assaulted by Hamed. The girl balked, terrified of her father’s reaction. Yet Enea went ahead and contacted a social agency that suggested she find a shelter for Sahar within the community, if escape should become necessary. “If Sahar felt she was in danger, she would have someplace to go.”

Sahar turned particularly to an instructor, Fathia Boualia, who was Muslim with a teenage daughter.

“Sahar is a girl who likes life and she wants to be free,” Boualia testified Thursday, remembering the girl who spent several hours a day with her, in both a math class and a “fostering” program for immigrant students. “She thought that at home things were a bit severe, Muslim-oriented.”

It was in Boualia’s class that Sahar had once fainted. When her parents couldn’t be reached, Sahar was taken to hospital by ambulance, Boualia following in her own car, staying with the girl until she was released later in the afternoon. Because neither parent had shown up, Boualia asked Sahar if she’d managed to relay what had happened through one of her siblings. Sahar said a sister — the one who can’t be named — might have transmitted the message, then added, mystifyingly: “Ma’am, it’s always the fact of furthering distancing me from the people who love me.”

Sahar loved Geeti, it seemed, most of all, her steadfast little ally.

In one of their chats, Sahar had said to Boualia: “Ma’am, I would like to ask your advice. Ma’am, if I move into an apartment, can I take Geeti with me?”

Boualia discouraged that plan. “I said, Sahar, that’s quite a responsibility. Taking Geeti, who was 13 years old…”

When Geeti learned Boualia had snubbed that scheme, the child was enraged. Boualia was not aware of the source of Geeti’s anger when the youngster acted so rudely in class that the teacher expelled her. Only afterwards, when the vice-principal urged Geeti to “speak her mind,” did those details come out. Boualia quoted Geeti thusly: “That lady (meaning Boualia) is not nice. She said to Sahar not to take me along with her.”

Boualia: “That made her furious. She was not happy.”

Boualia also described Geeti to the jury as “a bit different from her sisters. She didn’t like school. Geeti, whenever she steps into class, always asks to go to the bathroom to get out of class.”

Another teacher, Claudia Deslauriers — she had three Shafia children in her classes — told court about noticing marks on Sahar’s arms: bruises, scratches and scars.

“I asked who had done this to her? I told her no one had the right to do this to her. She didn’t say anything.”

Deslauriers arranged for a meeting with Tooba. The younger sister, Sahar’s apparent foe, acted as translator.

“The mother asked me if Sahar had kissed a boy, if she had a boyfriend. She seemed to be really angry.”

On the stand, Deslauriers admitted that she lied and said no, even though she’d seen Sahar canoodling with a boy. “I didn’t want Sahar to encounter any problems.”

To Deslauriers, Tooba made her objections clear. “The mother explained she did not accept the fact that her daughter was kissing a boy; that it didn’t fall within the parameters of her values.”

Teachers, counselors, police, child welfare authorities — Sahar’s life was crammed with interveners though the sum total of their effectiveness was zero.

On June 5, 2009, less than a month before Sahar’s lifeless body was found with the other victims in a Nissan sunk to the bottom of the Kingston Mills Locks, she was seen by a community social worker. Stephanie Benjamin told the jury that Sahar disclosed her hopes of renting an apartment.

“She was asking me to help her set aside money so she could leave the home as soon as she reached (legal) age. She was submitted to a lot of control by her older brother. He wanted her to wear the veil, he wanted to pick out her friends.”

Sahar further claimed, Benjamin testified, that she was no longer fearful of her father. “She said her father was living at a hotel, that the parents had been separated for some time.”

There has been no evidence heard of Shafia and Tooba separating in 2009.

Sahar told Benjamin she aspired to become a gynecologist. “She was moved by the poor health of women in Afghanistan.”

Benjamin assured the teenager she would help her find a job. They agreed to meet again the following day.

But Sahar never came back.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1092146--dimanno-portrait-of-very-sad-teen-emerges-at-kingston-murder-trial?bn=1

Tundratot

November 25th, 2011, 05:49 AM

So many missed opportunities, so many cries for help and understanding, all to come to absolutely nothing. How much worse is it to know that the younger children in the house were acting to drive a wedge even deeper?!!

Whisper

November 25th, 2011, 08:38 PM

Kingston detective befriended family, honour killing trial told

KINGSTON, Ont. — He was the good cop.
Jurors at the Shafia murder trial heard Friday that one Kingston Police detective was assigned to buddy up to the Montreal family suspected of killing four members, in a bid to ferret out information.
Steve Koopman, a young detective with a gentle manner, played his part by feeding the family lies.
"I thought, I'm going to . . . play the role of an officer where I really wasn't aware of everything that was happening, that I was still going to presume this as being more of a sudden-death investigation and obviously playing a bit ignorant in regards to my knowledge of everything that was happening," Koopman testified.
But Koopman knew exactly what was going on.
He received a phone call on July 3, 2009, from Staff Sgt. Chris Scott, the senior officer in charge of the case, telling him they were re-classifying it as a homicide, three days after a sunken car with four bodies inside was pulled from a shallow canal.
Koopman was one of the first officers to respond on the morning of June 30, 2009, when a submerged Nissan Sentra was found at Kingston Mills, an isolated transit point where a rural road crosses the Rideau Canal.
[...]
The family, driving in two cars, had stopped for a rest during the long drive home to Montreal from a family vacation in Niagara Falls, Ont.
Koopman developed a rapport with the family. He escorted the apparently grieving parents to the morgue to identify the bodies. He also attended the Montreal funeral on July 5, at a time when police already had concluded the family's Lexus SUV had been used to push the Sentra into the canal.
Police seized the Lexus on July 10, 2009, fearing critical evidence could be lost.
Koopman went to Montreal and asked the family for consent to take the SUV for examination, without telling them that police had secretly obtained a warrant that permitted them to seize and study the vehicle. The father agreed and the vehicle was taken.
Almost immediately, Koopman started getting phone calls, primarily from 18-year-old Hamed Shafia, the family's oldest son, asking whether the Lexus could be returned to them. Koopman told Hamed, in a July 13 call, that Kingston police identification officers weren't available to go to Montreal yet to process the vehicle. Koopman lied and said the Lexus was at a Montreal police impound lot.
A few days later, Hamed asked if he could go to the impound lot in Montreal to retrieve the Lexus.
"At that point, obviously that wasn't true, we had the vehicle here in Kingston," Koopman testified. "Again, it was a strategy or a ploy on our part."
Police even offered to pay for a rental car, but the family declined.
Koopman's testimony also revealed police pored over phone records in a bid to pinpoint the Shafia family's movements. The information provides an approximation of a phone's location when it is turned on and used for calls or texts.
Koopman compiled 7,000 records for four cellphones used by the family into a report of more than 400 pages.
The records revealed a phone believed to have been used by Hamed was in the Grand-Remous, Que., area on June 20, 2009.
It is a rugged location along the Gatineau River, more than 250 kilometres northwest of Montreal. When the Shafia family left Montreal on June 23 for a vacation in Niagara Falls, they drove first to Grand-Remous, then south to Ottawa and west along Hwy. 401, according to the phone records.
By the morning of June 25, the phones were in the Niagara region.
Two days later, on June 27, the phone that was listed in Rogers subscriber records as belonging to Hamed received a call at 8:24 p.m. through a cell tower near Kingston. The records show that the phone had travelled back to the Niagara region by the following evening.
On June 30, the cellphone that police believe was used by Sahar received a text message at 1:36 a.m., through a tower on Station Road, less than a kilometre from Kingston Mills. After that time, all calls to the phone were forwarded to voice mail. Police believe the Sentra plunged into the canal some time between 1:30 a.m. and 2 a.m.
Shafia, Yahya and Hamed were arrested on July 22, 2009, and each charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
Prosecutors allege it was an honour killing, orchestrated by Shafia because he believed his daughters had shamed him and his family by dressing in revealing clothes and consorting with boys.
They have pleaded not guilty.
In interviews after his arrest, Hamed denied that he was in the Kingston area on June 27. He could not explain the cellphone records.http://www.canada.com/news/Kingston+detective+befriended+family+honour+killin g+trial+told/5768720/story.html#ixzz1eld0xBUP

VXIII

November 25th, 2011, 10:13 PM

That Hamed sounds like a piece of work, and so does his sister who spied on and reported to her parents about her sisters at school, I wonder if any of them even feel bad at all, it doesnt seem like it...

Whisper

November 28th, 2011, 08:50 PM

I said this last week about being drowned someplace else,could explain the bruising on back of heads,or head being held against something like bottom of bathtub or sink

Shafia slaying victims may have drowned elsewhere, trial told

KINGSTON, Ont. – It is possible that three teenage Montreal sisters and their stepmother, who were found dead in a submerged car in 2009, drowned elsewhere and were stuffed into the vehicle before it plunged into a shallow canal, the Shafia murder trial heard Monday morning.
“From a pathology perspective I cannot include or exclude that. … It is possible,” forensic pathologist Dr. Christopher Milroy testified.
Prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis asked Milroy if his findings make it more or less plausible that the victims were incapacitated or had drowned someplace other than at Kingston Mills, the remote spot along the Rideau Canal where their bodies were discovered in a submerged car on June 30, 2009, before the vehicle went into the water.
Milroy said the pathology is “neutral” on the proposition.
The doctor's conclusion came at the end of his 90 minutes of testimony based on his autopsies of the four victims. Milroy found that all had died of drowning, but he could not say when or how the victims drowned.
Thorough toxicology tests did not reveal any evidence that the victims were incapacitated or had been sedated with any drugs or toxins, he said.
Mohammad Shafia, 58, clutched a tissue to his face and appeared to sob as graphic photos from the autopsies were flashed onto large monitors in the courtroom Monday. His son, Hamed Shafia, 20, sitting beside him in the prisoner’s box, also held a tissue to his face but did not appear distraught. The elder man's wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, was permitted to remain out of the courtroom for all of Milroy’s testimony.
[...]
Jurors were shown ghastly photos of three of the victims - Amir Mohammad, Zainab and Geeti - with the skin on their heads peeled back to reveal bruises on their crowns or foreheads.
“It clearly requires explanation, and what is somewhat unusual is that they have three areas of impact to the head and there is a relative absence of injury elsewhere on the body,” Milroy testified.
He could not explain the bruises.
Amir Mohammad had the most significant injuries. “
It’s a fairly substantial area of bruising,” Milroy testified.
Only Sahar did not have the mysterious bruises on her head.
The other victims also had minor bruises, discovered during internal examinations, in the muscles around the neck, shoulders and chest. These were probably caused during the dying process, Milroy testified.
[..]

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+slaying+victims+have+drowned+elsewhere+tria l+told/5778731/story.html#ixzz1f3DbIQsr

Whisper

November 28th, 2011, 08:54 PM

Victim heard Shafia scheming to kill, woman tells 'honour-killing' trial

Rona Amir Mohammad overheard Mohammad Shafia plotting to kill her and his 19-year-old daughter Zainab, according to a female relative of Rona who testified Monday at the murder trial of the Montreal man, his wife and son.The man, who travelled thousands of kilometres to appear at the trial, cannot be identified because of a court order that protects her identty until she has completed her testimony. She will be back on the witness stand Tuesday.

The witness said that Rona told her, in a telephone conversation before her death, that she overheard Shafia talking to his son Hamed and wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya in the hallway of the family's St. Leonard home one evening after Zainab had run away from home to a women's shelter in April 2009.

"Shafia was talking to Hamed and Tooba, that I will go to Afghanistan, I will prepare the passport, I will sell my property and then I will come and kill Zainab," the woman testified. She said Rona told her that Shafia was upset and angry.
"He told that to Tooba, 'If the girl doesn't return, I will kill her because she dishonoured me,' " the woman told jurors.

She said one of the other two people asked: "What about the other one?" and Shafia replied, according to the witness's account of the conversation with Rona, "I will kill the other one too."
The woman said Rona believed she was the other intended victim.
"I told her, 'Don't be afraid, this is not Afghanistan, this is not Dubai, this is Canada and don't be afraid . . . I told her nothing will happen," the woman testified.
[...]
The woman testified that she had regular phone calls with Rona, in which Rona complained of abuse by Shafia.
"He used to hit her and he'd hit her in front of the children," the witness said.
She could not provide any specifics of the alleged abuse, when she was questioned by defence lawyer Peter Kemp, who represents Shafia.
"I don't know what type of beaten up," she testified. The woman said Rona was agreeable to Shafia taking a second wife, because Rona was unable to have children, but the relationship deteriorated after they moved to Canada.
[...]
Milroy conducted autopsies on the victims and concluded all drowned, though he could not pinpoint when or where they drowned. Thorough toxicology tests did not find any evidence that the victims were incapacitated or sedated with any drugs or toxins.
[...]http://www.canada.com/news/Victim+heard+Shafia+scheming+kill+woman+tells+hono ur+killing+trial/5778812/story.html#ixzz1f3EbD789

VXIII

November 28th, 2011, 09:36 PM

Just my opinion but I have always kind of thought they probobly were drowned in the bathtubs at the motel then moved to the car, driven to canal and pushed in, wouldnt bruises on neck and shoulders and head be kind of what your injuries would be? (Sahar was so distraught and mentally beaten down, she may not have cared anymore and just accepted it and didnt try to struggle)

Muhammed clutching a tissue and appearing to cry when their death pictures were shown comes off as rather self serving, maybe to make the jury think he cares...
Hamed Shafia, 20, sitting beside him in the prisoner’s box, also held a tissue to his face but did not appear distraught. Hamed, we all read how he was begging to see their pics in the police interview, seemed like he got off on looking at the pics.

Stooba ought to be forced to see and listen to each and every pic they show and listen to every piece of testimony they have, no mercy for her just like she showed no mercy for her daughters, at first when they said she was crying and holding some pictures to her face I thought they were the dead girls pictures but later find out it was her "good" daughters picture, that just made me dislike here even more.

I will never forget Rona ever, she was an unselfish special woman, she raised the kids as her own but muhammed and stooba taught and encouraged them to disrespect her, I think she was a very intelligent and good woman stuck in a fucked situation. She as well as the girls also deserved so much more...

Jurors were shown ghastly photos of three of the victims - Amir Mohammad, Zainab and Geeti Sorry, but sometimes I get confused regarding the names, they used so many to mean one person, is Amir supposed to mean Sahar or Rona?

Thanks again Whisper for keeping us up to date on this daily and I wait for your updates every evening because I really want to know how this happened...

Whisper

November 28th, 2011, 11:03 PM

Bit more coming out now that courts been out couple hours how fucking awful she knew what was coming and nobody listened to ANY of the girls or her

'This is Canada,' terrified woman assured

KINGSTON, Ont. - A terrified woman begged for secrecy about her abusive living conditions out of fear her husband would kill her and his three teenaged daughters to preserve the Muslim family's honour, an Ontario court heard Monday.
The witness, who cannot be identified by court order, talked of how she tried to calm her older relative over the phone.
She was shivering. She was afraid," she testified.
"I told her don't be afraid: This is not Afghanistan. This is Canada. I told her nothing would happen."
[...]
Yahya — Shafia's second wife — had forbidden the young ones to talk to Mohammad, court heard.
"I'm just fed up with my life. I ask God to finish my life. I want to be in an accident," the witness testified Mohammad had told her.
Mohammad called the relative one last time just before a family trip to Niagara Falls, Ont.
"I love Canada and I want to stay here," the woman testified Mohammad told her.
"Those were her last words (to me)."
[..]
The witness also testified that Mohammad told her Shafia had threatened to kill Zainab for dishonouring the family by seeking help from social services.
The Crown has given Mohammad's age as 50, but her passport indicates she was 52.
[..]
Earlier in the day, Shafia convulsed in quiet sobs as autopsy photographs of his dead daughters and wife were shown in court.
It was a rare sign of emotion from Shafia, who had earlier smiled and chatted amiably with his lawyer.
Yahya, the mother of the girls, was allowed to leave court before the testimony in which a forensic pathologist said the females drowned, and showed no signs they had taken or been administered drugs or alcohol.
"These are graphic photographs," Crown lawyer Gerard Laarhuis warned. "People need to be prepared to see them."
Shafia's son, Hamed, who is also accused of first-degree murder in the deaths of his sisters, rubbed his eyes as the slides showing the dead women were shown.
Some showed the dead teens, with their long dark hair, awaiting the autopsies that turned up naval piercings and loose change in their jeans' pockets.
During his testimony, Dr. Christopher Milroy said unusually extensive toxicology tests were done on the bodies but turned up nothing untoward.
Searches for substances such as cyanide, cocaine, antifreeze, carbon monoxide, various forms of alcohol and other toxins all came back negative, Milroy said.
"There was nothing really that we could have tested for that was not tested for," Milroy told the jury trial presided over by Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger.
Three of the four victims did show mysterious minor or moderate bruising to the top or side of the heads but Milroy was unable to say what caused the bleeding or whether the victims would have been rendered unconscious.
He was adamant they would have woken up when they hit the water had they been simply sleeping.
"There was no evidence they had been subject to an attack or subject to a restraint," Milroy agreed under cross-examination.
He was unable to say whether they had drowned in the canal where they were found floating in the black Nissan Sentra, its ignition in the off position, but its gear shift in "low."
The Crown maintains the deceased were somehow incapacitated before they went into the canal.
The defence argues it would have been extremely difficult to have rendered them incapacitated or drowned them without leaving clear signs of trauma or other evidence.
The accused have cast the drownings as an accident.http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/this-is-canada-terrified-woman-assured

http://i43.tinypic.com/s473x0.jpg
Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and son Hamed Shafia, 20, are taken into court in Kingston, Ont., on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011

Whisper

November 29th, 2011, 02:29 AM

I want God to finish my life”
At the “honour killing” trial, autopsy photos reveal crucial clues

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.

Rona Amir Mohammad—the girls’ “stepmother” in their dad’s polygamous, patriarchal world—was the fourth relative discovered at the bottom of the Rideau Canal. Pulled from the back seat of the sunken Nissan Sentra, she was wearing six yellow bangles on her left wrist and three pairs of earrings. Dr. Christopher Milroy, the forensic pathologist who examined Rona’s lifeless body, noticed something else: two “fresh bruises” on the crown of her head, a total of 6 cm in diameter.

A close-up of those bruises was shown to a Kingston, Ont., courtroom on Monday—part of a graphic slideshow of autopsy photos that could prove crucial to the jury’s eventual verdict. As Dr. Milroy explained, Zainab and Geeti suffered nearly identical skull injuries, albeit smaller. “It clearly requires explanation,” he testified. “It is unusual that all three would have similar injuries.”

This much is not in dispute: extensive toxicology tests conducted on all four victims came back negative for a wide range of incapacitating substances, from alcohol to carbon monoxide to cyanide. Milroy also confirmed drowning as the official cause of death. However, the Ottawa-based pathologist could not say with scientific certainty whether the women actually died at the Kingston Mills Locks, or drowned somewhere else before being dumped in the canal. “The pathology is neutral on that scenario,” he testified. “I’m not able to determine, from a pathology point of view, whether they drowned somewhere else and then went into the water.”

The bruises certainly suggest the latter.

[...]
Gerard Laarhuis, one of two prosecutors working the case, warned the packed courtroom about the nature of the photos he was about to display. By then, Yahya had already been escorted out of the prisoners’ box, the sight of her deceased daughters too much to bear.

Rona was the first to flash on the big-screen televisions, her corpse still dressed in the jeans and blue top she was wearing three days earlier, when the family left their Niagara Falls “vacation” for the drive home to Montreal. As is typical during autopsies, the skin on her head was peeled back to allow a closer look at the bruising. “It is not a severe fracture, but neither is it minor,” Milroy said, using the arrow of a mouse to pinpoint the injury. “It was a firm impact.” When asked if such a blow could have knocked her unconscious, Milroy said it’s impossible to know for sure. “I can’t tell you what the likelihood is, but I can tell you that any blow to the head can certainly render somebody unconscious.”

Zainab appeared next, wearing tight black jeans, a red shirt and cardigan sweater—which, for reasons unknown, was on backwards. She had two bruises: one on her scalp, a diameter of 1.5 cm, and another on the right side of the crown, slightly smaller. In the bulletproof prisoners’ box, their ankles shackled, father and son could barely look at the screen. At times, they wiped their eyes with Kleenex.

The bruises on Geeti’s scalp were smaller than Rona’s but larger than Zainab’s. It is likely, Milroy said, that they were caused by a single impact of some kind. In his accompanying report, he described Geeti as “a well-nourished and well developed adolescent female.” She had 19 cents in her pocket.

Sahar, 17 when she perished, was not included among the post-mortem photos; of the four, she was the only one not bruised or scarred, at least not physically. Like the others, her hands and feet were wrinkled from hours in the water, and her stomach was full of potatoes, likely French fries. The vacationers had stopped at a McDonald’s just hours before they died.

Although police never found another crime scene, prosecutors obviously believe that the victims were either dead or unconscious before plunging into the water. None of them was wearing a seatbelt, and although the driver’s side window was wide open, nobody managed to escape.

“Were each of them fit, healthy, and able bodied?” Laarhuis asked Milroy.
“Yes.”

“What would happen if a sleeping person went into the water?”
“They would wake up,” Milroy said. “They would wake up immediately.”
During cross-examination, Shafia’s lawyer asked Milroy if it’s possible that the women bumped their heads on the rear windshield as the car fell into the water. (“I don’t know if it’s most likely,” he said. “But it’s certainly a possibility.”) Peter Kemp also asked the doctor, who has conducted nearly 5,000 autopsies in his career, how long it would take to drown someone by holding their head under water.
It would probably take two or three minutes,” he said. “But it could take as long as ten.”
“So to drown each one individually could take up to 40 minutes?” Kemp asked.
“It could be less than that,” Milroy answered.
[...]
She last spoke to Rona at the end of June 2009, right before the family’s road trip to the Falls. Days later, when Dr. Milroy completed his autopsy report, he noted the ring on Rona’s left finger and the watch on her other wrist. In his report, on page eight, he wrote: “Non-pregnant.”http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/11/29/%E2%80%9Ci-want-god-to-finish-my-life%E2%80%9D/

Whisper

November 29th, 2011, 09:00 PM

Shafia's first wife feared for her life, murder trial hears
Updated: Tue Nov. 29 2011 3:13:11 PM

KINGSTON, Ont. — An Afghan woman living in Montreal would not leave home or go to police for fear her abusive husband would kill her, an Ontario murder trial heard Tuesday.
In her testimony, Fahimah Vorgetts testified how Rona Amir Mohammad grew increasingly desperate in the year before she was found drowned along with her husband's three teen daughters.
"Almost every time she called, she would be crying and crying," Vorgetts testified.
"She said that if she leaves the house, if she goes to the police, her husband would kill her."
Vorgetts, an Afghan women's rights activist who now lives in Virginia, said she tried to persuade Mohammad to leave her husband Mohammad Shafia, who is now a co-accused in the four drowning deaths.
'The law here will protect you'
But in a series of furtive payphone calls, Mohammad said she had no status in Canada, had no documents because her husband kept them all, and worried about being sent back to Afghanistan where his relatives would kill her.
"She did not want her family name to be tainted by her actions," Vorgetts said.
"I did say, 'You're not in Afghanistan; the law here will protect you'."
Calling from a park payphone because she could not call from home, Mohammad told Vorgetts that Shafia had kicked her and pulled her hair.
She also talked about how Shafia's second wife, Tooba Yahya, would humiliate her constantly in front of the children and guests, Ontario Superior Court heard.
"You are no wife. You are a slave. You are a servant," Yahya would tell Mohammad, Vorgetts testified.
Under cross-examination, Vorgetts said she took no steps herself to call police, saying that it was Mohammad's decision to make, not hers.
In May 2009, Vorgetts returned from a trip to Afghanistan to find messages from Mohammad on her answering machine.
"They were desperate messages. It sounded like she was in big trouble. It sounded like she needed big help now. It sounded like she wanted to do something," she said.
"Then, I heard that she was dead."

Car submerged in canal
[...]
Victim's sister wants justice
Earlier in the day, Mohammad's youngest sister who came from France to testify, said all she wanted was justice to be done.
Speaking through an interpreter, Diba Abdaili Masoomi testified how her sister's marriage and relationship to Shafia was good in the beginning.
It deteriorated because she could not have children and he took on Yahya as his second wife, she said.
Like Vorgetts, Masoomi told the seven-woman, five-man jury of an increasingly abusive relationship relayed in phone calls from Montreal and escalating death threats against her and the daughters Shafia viewed as wayward.
Masoomi admitted under cross-examination she never told anyone about the distressed calls, saying she didn't believe anything like that could happen in Canada.
"In Afghanistan anything can happen. There is no law in Afghanistan. The women and children are dying," Masoomi testified.
"This is Canada. It's a developed country. Nothing like this will happen." http://ottawa.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111129/OTT_Shafia_111129/20111129/?hub=OttawaHome

Shafia trial told of abuse, violence against woman

[...]
Amir Mohammad was Shafia’s first wife, whom he married in his native Afghanistan before the family moved to Canada in 2007.
Vorgetts testified that Amir Mohammad would sneak out of the Shafia house in the evenings and call her secretly from a pay phone, pouring out her story of abuse and humiliation.
“She said her husband’s wife would mock her, put her down in front of the family’s guests,” Vorgetts testified.
During the phone calls, she added, Amir Mohammad would cry almost constantly. Vorgetts said she was told that Amir Mohammad was kicked by by Shafia.
Vorgetts said she urged her to leave the house and go to a shelter or a church or to police, but Amir Mohammad told her she was too afraid to leave.
“She said if she leaves, her husband will kill her,” Vorgetts testified.
The witness said she was told the family held all of Amir Mohammad's identity documents, including her passport, so Amir Mohammad believed she could not flee to another country, where she had relatives.
[...]
Vorgetts said her last phone contact with Amir Mohammad was in April 2009.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Shafia+trial+told+abuse+violence+against+woman/5784534/story.html#ixzz1f96x31gA

Tundratot

November 29th, 2011, 09:28 PM

Who knows, if she had left and gotten to safety, she might have been able to provide a refuge for the girls, too. So sad.

sheevaa

November 29th, 2011, 11:08 PM

Seems clear they whacked them on the heads to knock them out...I am curious about Sahar, though. If they didn't hit anyone, I figured it would have been the smallest, Geeti.

I feel awful for Rona, too. What a shitty life she had, under his thumb. Actually, I feel terrible for all of them. I still just can't picture thinking it's right to treat the women in your family like this. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Oh, I especially love that they let Toobitch leave the room so she didn't have to view the photos. Wasn't too difficult for you to assist in the murders, though, was it?

Whisper

November 30th, 2011, 08:53 PM

Shafia boyfriend suspected abuse, court hears

http://i44.tinypic.com/685t3t.jpg
Sahar and BF Ricardo Ruano

The boyfriend of Sahar Shafia suspected that she was being physically abused at home and hoped to marry her outside of Canada for safety reasons, witnesses testified Wednesday at the Kingston, Ont., canal deaths trial.
Sahar was one of three Shafia sisters found dead in a submerged car in the Rideau Canal in 2009.
On his second day of testimony, Ricardo Ruano of Montreal, told the court he saw big bruises on Sahar's arms and legs, which she said were the result of a fall. He said he told Sahar, 17, to tell the truth because he thought they were the result of being hit. She insisted she had fallen.
But the couple had talked about marrying in Ruano's native Honduras, his aunt testified, because they felt it would be safer than doing so in Montreal.
Erma Diaz Medina said that Sahar had told her several times that she was afraid her family would kill her if they ever found out about her romantic relationship.
"She loved Ricardo," Medina told the seven-woman, five-man jury. "She told me that she would love him till death."
A day earlier, the teen boyfriend, who could not be identified until his testimony was finished, described his four-month relationship with Sahar before she was found dead along with her sisters, Zainab, 19, Geeti, 13, and their father’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 50.
[...]
A youth services worker also testified Wednesday that in 2008 she recommended immediate intervention after speaking to Sahar about the abusive household.
"Sahar told me that she wanted to die — she couldn't take it any more," Evelyn Benayoun told court.
"She was feeling isolated, emotionally rejected by her parents. She was wishing to die and didn't know how to kill herself."
The witnesses were among the few remaining for the prosecution’s case against the accused Shafias.
[...]http://news.ca.msn.com/local/montreal/shafia-boyfriend-suspected-abuse-court-hears-9

DiManno: Elopement was the only escape, Shafia trial told

http://i44.tinypic.com/27xknpl.jpg
Sahar Shafia and her boyfriend, Angel Ricardo Ruano Sanchez, in a photo recovered from her cellphone.

KINGSTON—Hello. I love you. Let’s get married.
The courtship of Sahar Shafia and Angel Ricardo Ruano Sanchez was not quite that whirlwind but just about.
Within four months of meeting — introduced by older sister Zainab — 17-year-old Sahar was proposing wedlock to her secret boyfriend. Of course, in the Afghan culture from which the siblings emerged, unfamiliarity with prospective grooms was common practice. Their own mother, Tooba Yahya, met her husband, Mohammad Shafia, on the day the engagement was arranged, at the instigation of Shafia’s barren first wife. And Zainab would agree to marry the man her mother advocated after a 24-hour marriage to her preferred choice had been dissolved.
More relevantly — and just like Zainab before her — Sahar was desperate to flee the strict family household. Taking a husband offered the only escape where she might end up not dead. As events tragically unfolded, the teenager was doomed to perish anyway, along with Zainab and their younger sister Geeti and Shafia’s No. 1 wife — if no longer No. 1 in the connubial pecking order — Rona Amir Mohammad.
Ricardo had advised waiting longer but agreed to the union. So the young couple hatched a plan. They would run away to Ricardo’s native Honduras, where his parents still lived. And though the Sanchez family wasn’t Muslim, that would not be a problem.
My parents would have been normal,” Ricardo, 23, insisted on the witness stand here Wednesday, under cross-examination by Tooba’s lawyer, David Crowe, “because our religion as Christians is not as strong as Muslim. It’s a religion that is normal. I know my parents would not have asked her to convert. Why would they?”
Crowe, pouncing on the whiff of Islamophobia: “But yours is normal.”
As if Sahar’s faith, as interpreted by her family, had nothing remotely to do with the horror that ensued —
[...]
Sahar and her heart’s desire had revealed their elopement scheme to Ricardo’s aunt, Irma Medina. The youth had lived with Medina for a time after arriving in Montreal from Honduras. Sahar felt safe in the woman’s apartment, where she occasionally met her boyfriend after school.
“She told me that if her parents knew about her relationship with Ricardo, she would be a dead woman,” Medina told court. And Medina never doubted the genuineness of Sahar’s fear. “All the time she was talking to me, she was serious. She said if her parents learned about it, they would kill her.”
Despite her dread of that possibility, Sahar persisted with the relationship. “Because she loved Ricardo,” Medina explained, “she told me that. She said she would love him till death.”
hat certainly appears to have been the case. Ricardo, however, on the witness stand, was clearly startled by a particular photograph retrieved from Sahar’s cellphone —printed versions found also in Hamed’s suitcase when police executed a search warrant on the family’s home. In one of the photos, taken in early June, Sahar is being embraced by an unidentified young male.
There was so much, though, that Ricardo didn’t know about his Sahar. The girl rarely spoke of her family and the cruelties to which she was subjected. Indeed, Sahar had introduced herself as “Natasha’’ for some mystifying reason and that’s what Ricardo called her for the first three weeks that they dated.
During their four clandestine months together, Ricardo twice noticed bruising on Sahar’s arm. She told him that she’d suffered the bruises in a fall but Ricardo was skeptical. “It didn’t look like a bruise from a fall. It looked like a blow from when someone has hit you.”
The second time, Ricardo questioned Sahar more intently. “Tell me the truth. But she kept saying, no, I fell, I fell.”
Nor did Sahar disclose to Ricardo what apparently had wounded her most deeply — the absence of any mother-love.
As court has heard, Tooba had handed over her third-oldest of seven children to Rona shortly after the baby was born. This also is common practice in polygamous Afghan marriages when one of the wives is unable to bear children. Further, Sahar had expressed sadness to teachers and child welfare workers at being shunned within the family, punished when a younger brother tattled to the parents about having seen her being kissed by a boy. Her siblings had been ordered not to talk to Sahar and this silent treatment had lasted “for a long time.”
The teenager’s anxiety and depression — she admitted to a suicide attempt that had received no sympathy from her mother — prompted a vice-principal to call in a social worker from Batshaw Youth and Family Centres, an agency that deals exclusively with English-speaking children in Montreal.
Evelyn Benayoun was the intake worker who fielded that call. She spoke with the vice-principal, who then handed the phone to Sahar.
She felt that she was emotionally rejected by her mother,” Benayoun testified Wednesday. “Her mother wasn’t talking to her.”

Sahar said: “I want my mother to speak to me.”
Benayoun was sufficiently alarmed by what she heard — including the vice-principal’s suspicions that Sahar was being physically and mentally abused in the home, by older brother as well as parents — that she flagged the case as “Code 1,” meaning it demanded immediate intervention.
“Sahar told me she wanted to die because she was extremely sad, sad because the home situation was unbearable for her. She was feeling isolated, singled out by her mother, who persistently refused to speak to her, and she couldn’t take it anymore.”
The suicide ideation was especially worrisome. “But when I asked her how she would do it, she didn’t have a plan.”
During the phone conversation, Sahar sounded conflicted about what she wanted authorities to do for her. “She was extremely scared. She told me she wasn’t allowed to share information about the family with outsiders and she knew she was doing that.”

Under cross-examination by Hamed’s lawyer, Patrick McCann, Benayoun agreed that she hadn’t made any notation about physical abuse by the brother in the in-take file turned over to the social worker who later met Sahar face-to-face. Benayoun tried to explain — while being constantly interrupted — that the allegation had originated with the vice-principal who initiated the complaint and she would only have included further remarks if Sahar had denied it.
Observing the nature of a job where Benayoun routinely heard about claims of mistreatment and abuse, McCann asked: “I take it those sorts of things happen every day in your profession?”
Benayoun: “It doesn’t end the way this case ended
[...]
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1094832--dimanno-elopement-was-the-only-escape-shafia-trial-told?bn=1

Whisper

December 1st, 2011, 02:09 AM

I had to go to my moms earlier and that means I have drive through a 6 block area that all the arabic stores,resturants,homes have taken over
And its always the men standing outside of them all and never see the women ever
And I know they arent all like Shafia but they all looked like it to me in the moment and I was so tempted to fucking leave the road and run them down all I saw was 50 Shafias,all old men
I actually found myself pissed at him while I was driving in a "how dare you" moment
How dare you come to my country where for the most part we are peaceful and welcome anyone and you come here and fucking use your homelands "honor killing"bullshit here in my country
You wanna fucking use that shit (and shouldnt anywhere) but if your that sick keep it in your country
I have many arabic friends and neighbors and the men arent like Shafia,he was extreme

For him to sit and say they are getting to "westernized",,WTF,you brought them here,we didnt kidnap them and force them to live here
They came and saw we treat women as humans and realized your way was wrong
I hate when they are all"in my country this and my country that,women behave blah,fucking .blah
Well then stay in your fucking country

let the attacks begin but thats JMHO

Tundratot

December 1st, 2011, 03:16 AM

Tell us what you think, Whisper. Hmm-Huh! Amen to that!

Whisper

December 1st, 2011, 01:20 PM

Tell us what you think, Whisper. Hmm-Huh! Amen to that!
lol ty I just as it goes on I get more and more pissed at how he thought he was really going to play us and pull one fucking over and now we are paying for him and his fucked up family with our taxs

Hes supposebly a millionaire,I hope to god they take back every cent from him that is being paid out for the trial and stuff but also food and lodgings in the jails

This is Christie Blatchford: column from lastnights paper I love her she takes the whole days proceedings and puts it like it is

Christie Blatchford: Fear kept alleged honour killing victims imprisoned in misery

KINGSTON, Ont. — What a wretched tale of misery is unfolding at the Shafia family murder trial here.
Whatever verdicts the Ontario Superior Court jury ultimately reaches, what is virtually undeniable is that this household functioned like a mini totalitarian state, where everyone walked on eggshells or outright lived in fear and where intimates were turned against and snitched on one another to the power-holders.
Smack in the middle of one of Canada’s most proudly cosmopolitan cities — Montreal, where they lived — this family of Afghan immigrants was still imprisoned in their homeland’s archaic culture.
The boys of the family were spying on the girls, looking for signs of loose Western behaviour; the older girls were so desperate for a way out they agreed to marry virtually any boy who looked at them twice; the two wives, quietly living in an illegal and secret polygamous marriage, were at one another’s throats, with the fertile one lording it over the older, barren one.
[...]
Tuesday, the jurors and Judge Robert Maranger heard from Afghan women’s rights activist Fahima Vorgetts that Ms. Amir wanted out.
“But she was afraid,” said Ms. Vorgetts, who spoke to Ms. Amir two or three times a week by phone during the last year of her life.
“She said if she leaves, or goes to the police, her husband will kill her” or “send her back to Afghanistan.”
A resident of Virginia, Ms. Vorgetts, who still visits Afghanistan to work with women there twice a year, first heard from Ms. Amir hrough a mutual relative.
Almost every time she called,” she said, “she would be crying.” She complained about her humiliation at Ms. Yahya’s hands, the utter lack of control she had over even her own passport, the cruelty by Mr. Shafia.
Ms. Vorgetts gave her the same advice she gives other women — “leave the situation, leave the house” — and told her, “You’re in a Western country: There are shelters, police who protect you, or a church.”
But Ms. Amir, she said, was too afraid; she took the threats seriously.
It was also the culture,” Ms. Vorgetts said. “She would taint the family name [by leaving]… a divorced woman would be looked down on, especially at that age.”
Though Ms. Amir was in Canada only on a series of temporary visitor’s visas — the lone member of the family to be in that tenuous spot — she held some real cards in this battle, but may never have realized it.
If Canadian immigration authorities had discovered she was wife No. 1, and not the cousin her husband had pretended to officials when the family moved here in 2007, the whole Shafia clan might have been in the soup.
Certainly, a Montreal immigration lawyer testified Tuesday, their status as permanent residents would have been in jeopardy and possibly withdrawn, though a government moratorium against deporting Afghans to their homeland would have meant the Shafias wouldn’t have been removed. They could have applied as refugees.
On May 1 of 2009, Ms. Vorgetts headed to Afghanistan; when she returned in June, though Ms. Amir had left several messages (“she sounded like she was in big trouble and really needed big help”). She never heard from her again.
The family, as the jurors have heard, were by late June on a trip to Niagara Falls; it was this trip that ended with the four bodies being discovered in the canal, and, about a month later, with the trio being arrested.
Almost daily, there is testimony from witnesses about the repressive Afghan culture in general and how it was enforced at the Shafia home.
One of Ms. Amir’s sisters, Diba Abdali Masoomi, said she knew of her sister’s plight, and reminded her, when she reported threats from Mr. Shafia, “in Afghanistan anything can happen … but this is a developed country.” Ms. Masoomi also said that Ms. Amir had also told her how Hamed had once disciplined one of the boys and how the boy had said, “My father has the right to hit me, but who are you to hit me?”
Another time, asked how, if her sister was so under her husband’s thumb she had so much gold jewellery, Ms. Masoomi said, “I am an Afghan lady. I have one box of jewellery; it is our custom.”
The day’s final witness was a young boyfriend of Sahar’s, a shy, even grave, fellow of 23.
An immigrant who just arrived in Montreal in 2008, he isn’t Afghan, and doesn’t speak Dari, so the two spoke French (hers was good, he was learning) and she learned a little of his language. (His name is protected by a temporary publication ban.) They dated for only four months, but were planning to marry, he said.
Most of their dates consisted of having lunch during her school day. Once, they were hugging when one of her relatives walked into the restaurant: At Sahar’s insistence, the young man said, they sprang apart, and he pretended to be another girl’s boyfriend.
When the Shafias went away on their trip, they managed a few phone calls, and he sent her a couple of besotted texts in his first language, which Sahar understood only a little.
In her last text, sent the night she died, she told him they were about three hours away from Montreal, and were going to stop at a Kingston motel.
When she stopped answering his texts, the young man called her 22 times in the next 17 hours. All went to voice mail.
Part of what he wrote in a text a week earlier were these lines: “The world is very large, it’s so large that one day I could even lose you. But in this world, as large as it is, know there’s a small heart, and you can never get lost in that heart, because it’s only for you, my love.”
If Sahar couldn’t read every word, perhaps she recognized the love and sweetness there, and took comfort
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/29/christie-blatchford-fear-kept-alleged-honour-killing-victims-imprisoned-in-misery/

http://i40.tinypic.com/aeksxf.jpg
Ronas sister,Diba Adaili Masoomi

Whisper

December 1st, 2011, 08:59 PM

‘Honour’ violence: a crime against humanity

The Shafia family murder trial in Kingston, where the Crown is now wrapping up its case, has become a lightning rod for heated cultural discussions. It’s been depicted as a multicult horror story, a family soap opera, a feminist morality tale, and an anatomy of a mass killing, all rolled into one.
[...]
know people who couldn’t bear to read a word of the heartbreaking and enraging narrative that emerged in court about an allegedly tyrannical and polygamous father, his coldly complicit second wife, their feisty and unhappy teenage daughters desperate for help, and the turmoil and abuse that ruled this Afghan-Canadian family in which the brothers acted as enforcers.
[...]
We’ve come to know such intimate and tender things about these girls and women, their belly button studs, their purple nail polish, the lushly romantic texts their forbidden boyfriends sent (“I want only you to be the owner of my heart”). I’ve become especially moved by Sahar – her choice of boyfriend, her spirit, her clear sense of danger – to the point where, when I remind myself how she died, I am shocked all over again.
So-called honour killings are a crime against nature, against humanity, against family love and, above all, against females.
But what could have led to an intervention in what was clearly a deteriorating home situation, where, according to testimony, the young women were ostracized, threatened and physically abused?
Certainly, lots of media and experts have laid blame: It was the soft squishy centre of multiculturalism that did them in, some argue, with child welfare officers and teachers accepting that, because of their cultural values, things were bound to be different at home.
We don’t expect or demand strongly enough, said one social worker interviewed on the CBC, that immigrant families conform to “Canadian” ways of behaviour – although these Shafia girls were very Canadian in their teenage rebellion, all about the clothes, the makeup, the boyfriends and the bad marks.
In our country, people say, women don’t risk death by acting out. But that’s not quite true, is it? Many women here, not from “honour societies,” have been killed by husbands and partners for dressing provocatively or daring to seek romantic or sexual pleasure elsewhere. That’s why Constance Backhouse, a feminist historian at the University of Ottawa, prefers to use the term “femicide” to describe what is on trial here. As she bravely wrote in an e-mail, “I think our culture has just as bad a record.”
ut surely the difference is that we now loudly condemn violence against women, ostracize the perpetrators, that we’ve come a long way in inculcating in our society the belief that women – just because they are women – are not the property of men.
The problem is that some members of certain ethnic societies simply do not accept that women are equal to men, and the result is deadly. The UN reports that 5,000 females a year are victims of honour killings. These girls and women are annihilated in the name of family, religion, as a cultural prerogative, and because there is some support within their community for what, in one gruesome phrase, is called “washing shame with blood.” Those convicted of such killings may become tacit heroes in their communities.
Many, if not most, Afghans, Pakistanis and Kurds, to name three ethnic groups that have been identified with honour violence, and the majority in any other ethnic group, do not believe in, carry out, or support these killings.
And reading the riot act at our borders – “Hey, you do know that killing your daughters because they are dressing and behaving, as you say, like ‘whores,’ is wrong, don’t you? We don’t even call women whores here!” – is obviously not going to work.
Muslim activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who started a foundation to combat honour violence, has argued in the Huffington Post that police and service providers should both receive and provide special training around these killings.
The other issue, she writes, is “bad choices of dialogue partners” – traditional community leaders speaking on behalf of an entire group who not only deny what is going on, but seek to “disempower” moderate and feminist representatives among them.
[...]
What eventually stops honour violence or any other violence against women is the insistence on this simple belief all over the world.
And yes, feminism still matters, has never mattered more. It changed the way Western men view and treat women, and one day, it will be responsible for those changes around the world.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/news-and-views/judith-timson/honour-violence-a-crime-against-humanity/article2257290/

Shafia trial: relative told teen feared parents
KINGSTON, Ont. - Sahar Shafia told her boyfriend's aunt she believed her parents would kill her if they found out about her relationship with the young man from Honduras but she planned to tell them about it because she would love him ``until death,'' the murder trial of her parents and brother heard.
``She told me that her parents did not know about the relationship with Ricardo and the day that her parents knew about the relationship with Ricardo she would be a dead woman,'' Erma Medina testified Wednesday.
She said Sahar repeated the claim several times and appeared serious.
[...]
Sanchez testified they kept the relationship secret out of fear of the reaction of her family. He believed the family would not approve of the union between the Spanish-speaking Christian and the teenage Muslim girl whose family is from Afghanistan.
Sanchez lived with his aunt for a time and Sahar visited him there.
Medina last talked to Sahar in April 2009, she testified. She said Sahar told her she planned to tell her parents about Sanchez but she hoped to move to Honduras to marry him.
``They would get support and feel more secure in my country than in this country,'' Medina testified, through a Spanish interpreter, as did Sanchez. She said Sanchez's father and other relatives are in Honduras.
Medina was asked by prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis why Sahar would tell her parents about her boyfriend if she believed they would kill her. ``Because she loved Ricardo . . . and said that she would love (him) until death,'' Medina replied.
[...]
Sahar told the woman of physical abuse by her older brother Hamed, at the behest of her parents, and that she was emotionally rejected by her mother. Benayoun said Sahar told her that her mother would not speak to her and her siblings were forbidden to talk to her, as punishment for having introduced a sister to a boy.
``She said, `I want my mother to speak to me,''' Benayoun testified.
She coded the case as an emergency requiring immediate action.
Jurors already have heard that a Batshaw investigator met with Sahar and concluded that the allegations were true but the file was closed and no action was taken because Sahar was not considered to be in immediate danger.
The trial is adjourned until Monday, when Crown prosecutors will call their final witness, a professor at the University of Toronto who has studied honour killings. It is not known if defence lawyers will call any evidence after the Crown completes its case.
Prosecutors allege the victims were slain in an honour killing, purportedly orchestrated by Shafia because he believed his daughters had shamed him by taking boyfriends and dressing in revealing clothing. http://www.canada.com/Shafia+trial+relative+told+teen+feared+parents/5791370/story.html#ixzz1fKnDczCC

Whisper

December 1st, 2011, 09:05 PM

I was running all over today paying bills and a bit of shopping and we have ALOT of young girls that wear the hajib here b/c of the large arabic area
But I really caught myself looking at them for bruises and checking them right out today
making sure I caught their eye and smiled at them at least b/c so many stare at the ground
This case has really caught my attention of how these girls are treated(not all) but I am going to get involved in a centre downtown here that helps these women over here called Canadian Women Working With Immigrant Women,showing them the ropes of finding jobs and independence,starting with teaching them english

EDIT; dont know what I can teach them or help them with but I can really arrange good ass kicking of men that abuse them,I have good connections in that dept

Tundratot

December 1st, 2011, 10:06 PM

Whisper Are you going to enlist Pete Bondurant's little band of ass tearers?

Whisper

December 1st, 2011, 10:12 PM

Whisper Are you going to enlist Pete Bondurant's little band of ass tearers?
Tundratot
lol yes I am

Whisper

December 3rd, 2011, 08:50 PM

This is in tonights paper

What really happened

One of the most difficult tasks for Kingston Police investigating the Kingston Mills multiple murder case was determining the sequence of events that led to the deaths of four women in the early morning hours of June 30, 2009.

The three people now standing trial for first-degree murder — Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their son, Hamed — insisted it was a case of misadventure.

They told police their eldest daughter, Zainab, had taken a car on a late-night joy ride and somehow managed to drive a winding route at the Kingston Mills locks until she and her two sisters and their father's first wife plunged over the side of the lock wall and drowned.

Early in their investigation, however, police developed the theory that the discovery of the Shafia family's black Nissan Sentra in the waters of Colonel By Lake was staged to look like an accident.

Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia and 53-year-old Rona Amir Mohammad, they suspected, were victims of a family honour killing.

As the accused tell their stories, they were on their way home from a family vacation in Niagara Falls in two vehicles, when Tooba says she is too tired to continue driving.

Tooba waits in the Nissan with Geeti, Sahar, Zainab and Rona, while Hamed and Mohammad drive off to find motel rooms for the night.

It is nearly 2 a.m.

The men book into rooms 18 and 19 of the Kingston East Motel on Hwy. 15.

At this point, the stories begin to change.

Jurors in the trial have heard several variations of the events that followed, as told by the co-accused themselves in a series of interrogations and interviews beginning later that day.

As the trial prepares to hear Monday from an expert on honour killings, we recap the evidence jurors have heard about what happened on that fateful night.

•

MOHAMMAD SHAFIA

In his June 30, 2009, interview with Mohammad Shafia, Kings*ton Police Det. Geoff Dempster tried to locate exactly where he and his son, Hamed, left Tooba waiting with the family Nissan that night.

"Was it a store?" Dempster asks.

"No it was a road, not a store … on the side," Mohammad replies.

The family was on its way back home to Montreal from a vacation in Niagara Falls when they decided to stop for the night in Kingston. Mohammad says they checked into the second motel they came across on Hwy. 15.

"Yes, at the second place, and we paid the money and signed everything," he tells the detective. "My wife was with the girls, these four people."

Dempster was probing the Montreal man for information about how three of his daughters and a woman later determined to be his first wife wound up at the foot of the Kingston Mills lock, dead, inside the family's submerged Nissan Sentra.

Shafia, his wife and son are on trial at Frontenac County Court House, each charged with murdering the four women.

Jurors watching a video recording of Dempster's interview with Shafia hear how the officer wants to know how Tooba gets to the motel with the Nissan.

"We ... told her to take this road down, and she came and stopped her car," Mohammad Shafia said.

At the Kingston East Motel, Mohammad continues, "we went to our umm, the daughter went uhh, the four people went to the other room, room number 18."

That's when Hamed told his parents he was driving on to Montreal to take care of some family business. The motel manager testified that it was after 2 a.m. that the family's other car, a Lexus, left the motel parking lot and headed north on Hwy. 15 in the general direction of Kingston Mills, several kilometres away.

Dempster asks Mohammad what he remembers next.

"I woke up in the morning (and) I saw that the car is not there," he said "First I looked outside, I washed my face and went outside. I saw that the car was not there. I checked the door (to their room) and saw that nobody was there."

Mohammad purchased a phone calling card from the motel manager that morning. He tells Dempster that his first call is to Sahar, one of the daughters found dead in the submerged car. When she doesn't answer her cellphone he calls Hamed in Montreal.

Mohammad tells Dempster he has no idea what happened the night before.

"I was thinking … they had left the room."

He speculates that Zainab, another of the daughters found dead in the car, may have taken it to Montreal.

"When I called Hamed in Montreal, I asked if they had come there, Zainab and them, with Rona, and … he said no," Mohammad tells Dempster.

On the day of the Shafias' arrest on July 22, Mohammad was interrogated by RCMP Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh.

He tells the officer that the entire family of 10 had checked into the motel.

Mehdizadeh tells him police found a witness living near Kingston Mills to prove Mohammad is lying.

At about 2 a.m., Mehdizadeh says, a person had come out to his balcony. "He couldn't sleep, he was looking around."

The officer shows Mohammad photos taken by police from a house across Colonel By Lake from the lock station where the car went into the water.

"It means when from this house, this person looks toward this side," says Mehdizadeh, "he sees this. We have reports that a person was watching, he had seen something like this: one small car and one bigger SUV."

The lights on the small car were off, but the lights on the SUV were on, Mehdizadeh says.

"After close to 20 minutes or so, they heard the sound of water. Something like that had gone (into) the water."

Mehdizadeh goes on to tell Mohammad that after the sound of water, a horn is heard, for close to 45 seconds."

Shafia sticks to the original story, saying "when they say around 2 o'clock and a few minutes, we had gone to bed at 1:30 o'clock at the motel ... my son, my wife, I, all of us were in the motel. No way nothing has been existed to cause this (to) happen."

•

TOOBA MOHAMMAD YAHYA

According to Tooba Mohammad Yahya's first interview with Kings*ton Police Det. Geoff Dempster on June 30, when the family got to Kingston, Hamed Shafia texted her saying that they would stop and find a motel.

"Me, very bad vomiting," says Tooba. "I couldn't drive so I stopped the car."

She says she doesn't know exactly where they stopped.

"When they got to the motel, they wanted to come to get me but I came myself," she explains. "When they were about to turn from the motel and come towards me, I got near them. I got the kids off, with my cousin (Rona Amir Mohammad) and husband."

According to Tooba's account, all 10 family members began moving into the two rooms at the Kingston East Motel, with daughters Zainab, Sahar, Geeti, and Rona — the four women who would end up dead — taking their own room.

"Not too long after, my older daughter came and knocked on the door and asked for the keys to pick up some clothes from the car trunk," she tells Dempster.

"After that I don't know what happened. I just slept."

The next morning, Mohammad tells her that the girls and Rona and the Nissan are missing. Tooba tells Dempster she believes Zainab took the car for a drive in the middle of the night.

"I think she thought, 'My mom and dad are asleep, let's go for a drive'," she says.

Dempster asks Tooba where she was when the car went in the water.

"No, no I wasn't there," she replies.

Tooba was interrogated by the RCMP's Shahin Mehdizadeh for more than six hours on July 22, prior to Mohammad's interrogation.

The RCMP officer asks her outright if she has killed her daughters and Rona. She denies it.

Then she repeats the story about checking into the motel and Zainab coming for the key to get her clothes from the Nissan.

The next morning, "I went to their room and saw their beds were unmade, their sleeping beds were disorganized, no one was there."

Mehdizadeh confronts her with the police theory that the Lexus was used to bump the Nissan into the water after it had gotten stuck on the edge of the lock wall.

Pointing to a photo he says, "Here is a house and we have someone who is in this house … and they heard a vehicle, a thing, fell off into the water and there was a noise too for five seconds, there was a noise of the car horn."

He also tells her about the pieces of Lexus headlight found at the lock matching pieces found in Montreal where Hamed ditched the vehicle the morning of June 30.

Mehdizadeh wants to know who was driving the Lexus that night at Kingston Mills. Tooba insists it was Mohammad. She also agrees that the vehicle was at the scene.

After further questioning she insists again that both vehicles went to the motel.

Then there is a change.

Tooba places both the vehicles at Kingston Mills that night and talks about Mohammad coming to sit in the Nissan while she goes to the Lexus to sleep.

"I went to a deep sleep … because I had driven for four hours and was sick, too, and taking medication," she tells the interrogator. "The next time I woke up was morning."

"Then who took you from the Lexus to the hotel?" Mehdizadeh asks.

"Oh, excuse me; excuse me, when I woke up, you are right. I made a mistake," Tooba says. "When I woke up and went … to the motel that they had rented … then I got my luggage and went inside."

Tooba also reveals that, several days earlier, the family had driven through Kingston Mills on the way to Niagara Falls so the children could use the washroom.

"We went down and crossed to the other side. We went to the other side looking for a toilet," Tooba says.

Then she describes waiting at Kingston Mills the night of June 30 while the two men go to search for a motel.

Zainab, she says, wanted to use the toilet — and all of them were awake, including Sahar, Geeti and Rona.

"Since it was dark, she got scared," Tooba recalls. "She was scared and said, 'No, I don't want to go. Wait till dad comes.' "

Mehdizadeh says he can't believe that the four women would just sit in the car as it fell into the canal without trying to escape.

Tooba insists that "if I was awake and they were pressing and putting them into the water, I might have known it … I would have been shaken or would have heard a sound of splashing or something, but believe me, I don't know nothing about the detail of this story, how it has happened."

Then another revelation from Tooba.

"I know this much that Shafia brought them here," Tooba says, looking at a photo of the locks provided by Mehdizadeh.

"I know because we changed, we changed the car."

She says that she and Hamed were standing at the side of the road by the Lexus, in the dark, when they heard a sound.

"We both ran and we saw that a car was in the water. This car has fallen into the water," she says.

Tooba's reaction?

"I screamed and fell down. I didn't understand … what happened to this car. Just when I realized that this went into the water, I screamed and fell down. I screamed and fell down so I became unconscious."

She says that when she got to the motel later, "I was still not thinking that the girls had been fallen into the water. I thought that their dad had already taken them."

As the interrogation continues, Tooba insists she did not see the Lexus push the Nissan into the water. Mehdizadeh asks what the girls were doing as they went into the water.

"How do I know that?" Tooba replies. "In the darkness, it was as dark as the grave over there."

The next day, Tooba told police she was withdrawing everything she said during the interrogation.

•

HAMED SHAFIA

Hamed was also interviewed by Kingston Police on June 30 then interrogated on July 22, the arrest day.

Much of his story on June 30 revolved around his insisting that, shortly after the family checked into the Kingston East Motel, he left for Montreal so he could use his laptop computer to do some urgent business.

As jurors watch the videotape, Kings*ton Police Det. Geoff Dempster says that he believes Hamed Shafia has more information about his sisters' deaths than he is telling.

"Yeah, but I'm telling the truth here," Hamed insists.

On July 22, he undergoes a four-hour interrogation by two Kingston Police detectives who accuse him and his parents of conspiring to murder the four women.

Police at that time thought they might be able to view video footage from a transport ministry camera at Hwys. 15 and 401. They ask Hamed if it would show him or his father driving the Nissan the morning of June 30.

"It's either gonna show Zainab or Sahar," says Hamed.

When told that, during her interrogation, his mother had just placed all of them at Kingston Mills, Hamed replies: "I don't believe that my mom says this."

In November 2009, police received drastically different information about the events of June 30.

Hamed was recorded at Quinte Detention Centre talking about how he was at the side of the locks as he watched the Nissan sink beneath the water.

In the audio recording, presented at trial two weeks ago, Hamed says that Zainab wanted to go driving in the Nissan and that he followed the four women in the Lexus as they left the motel parking lot and headed north on Hwy. 15.

Arriving at a gas station at Code's Corners, he says Zainab then drove west on Kingston Mills Road.

At the mills, he accidentally bumps into the Nissan from behind. While picking up pieces of headlight on the road, the Nissan drives onto the grass at the lock station.

Then, in the dark, he hears a splash.

That's when he runs to the edge and sees the submerged car.

He runs back to the Lexus and blows the horn as a signal for help.

Then he gets a yellow rope from the back of his vehicle and dangles it in the water.

When there is no response from anyone in the water, he gets back in the Lexus and heads to Montreal as he had originally planned — without calling police or telling his parents what had happened[..].http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3392175

Tundratot

December 4th, 2011, 04:24 AM

So not true. Those women would have tried to escape if they had been in the car -- conscious -- when it was either accidentally pushed or just inadvertently rolled into the lock. And, no simple roll would have put it there.

They had to be either knocked out, or under enough duress to be too afraid to even try to escape.

Whisper

December 5th, 2011, 10:12 PM

Crown calls final witness in Shafia murder trial

On Monday, Crown prosecutors called what is expected to be their final witness in a high-profile murder trial involving the deaths of four women from the same Montreal family.
The first-degree murder trial of Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their adult son, Hamed Shafia, began in a Kingston, Ont., court in October.
[...]
The Crown's final witness is an expert on honour crimes, a choice CTV's Genevieve Beauchemin said was related to the prosecution's belief that family honour was the motive for the killings.
"The reason that they are talking so much about honour crimes is the Crown has alleged that this case hinges on an honour killing," Beauchemin reported from Kingston.
According to the Crown, the four victims were perceived to have dishonoured their family "by having boyfriends, by dressing more provocatively, by being more rebellious in some way," Beauchemin said.
During the trial, jurors have been hearing about Mohammad Shafia's personal belief that his family honour was of paramount importance to him.
On a wiretap recording played previously in court, Shafia is heard saying that nothing is more important to him than his honour.http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111205/shafia-family-murder-trial-kingston-court-111205/20111205/?hub=MontrealHome

Family honour sometimes trumps human life, expert tells Shafia trial

KINGSTON, Ont. — After a dizzying parade of nearly 50 witnesses in 25 days, jurors in the Shafia honour killing trial heard one final prosecution witness Monday — an academic who testified that in some cultures, family honour is considered more important than human life.
"A rumour could cause the killing of a young woman," testified Shahrzad Mojab, a native of Iran who is a professor at the University of Toronto. The judge accepted her as an expert on honour killings and related issues of culture, religion, patriarchy and violence in Middle Eastern and South Asian societies and in immigrant diasporas in western nations.

Mojab has been studying these issues for more than 15 years, edited a book on honour killing, has written dozens of research papers and has attended dozens of conferences and seminars. She has provided advice to the United Nations and, last year, she explained the concept of honour killing at a conference of Toronto Police homicide investigators.
[...]
Prosecutors allege that the murders were orchestrated because the teenage sisters dressed provocatively, took boyfriends, disobeyed their father and, in the case of Zainab, ran away from home to be with a young man of her choosing. Jurors heard that Rona Mohammad complained of abuse and wanted a divorce.
Mojab was not asked to comment on the facts of the Shafia case. She explained the concept of honour killing and the motivations of perpetrators.
"The shedding of the blood is a way of purifying the name of the family . . . and restoration of the honour of the family," Mojab told the seven women and five men on the jury.
She said that in traditional, patriarchal families, the chastity, virginity and obedience of girls and women is vital to the maintenance of family honour. Men, who have power in the families, control women's bodies and have exclusive access to them. If a woman dresses immodestly or consorts with other men, or is believed to have done those things, she may be perceived to have shamed the patriarch and may be marked for death.
"There are cases that female members of the family and, in particular mothers, participate by different means in the . . . planning or (are) directly involved in the act of the killing," Mojab testified.
She said the conspiracy among family members is a characteristic that distinguishes honour killings from domestic violence. She said honour killing is an ancient cultural practice among Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians.
"It doesn't have any direct connection with religion at all," she said, characterizing it as a means for men to maintain the gender inequality which affords them a privileged position in families and society.
Mojab said that in many cases she has studied, perpetrators who murder their children claim that they loved them but say that their deaths were necessary because they restored the honour of the family and the honour of the child who transgressed.
"It is (considered) part of the continuum of love and care," Mojab testified.
She said some immigrants don't shed these strict views when they move to new countries. Instead, they "freeze" their concept of their home culture at the moment in time when they left their native country and resist integration in a new home by clinging to old beliefs.
Defence lawyer Peter Kemp, who represents Shafia, asked Mojab if the shame of a family would not be purified if an honour killer denied committing the murder.that's often the initial reaction," she replied. "But then there are many cases that, even after the father is imprisoned, they acknowledge that the act that was committed was to purify the name of the family."
In answer to another question, Mojab said an honour killing would still be considered to have cleansed the family's shame, even if the death was disguised as an accident.
The trial was adjourned until Thursday, when it is expected that Mohammad Shafia will testify as the defence begins presenting evidence.
Jurors were told the case is likely to extend into January. http://www.canada.com/news/Family+honour+sometimes+trumps+human+life+expert+t ells+Shafia+trial/5814753/story.html#ixzz1fiTv89RR

Tundratot

December 6th, 2011, 12:06 AM

Mojab said that in many cases she has studied, perpetrators who murder their children claim that they loved them but say that their deaths were necessary because they restored the honour of the family and the honour of the child who transgressed.

If it also cleansed the child, then why was Shafia still so freaking angry at them? He should have been all about how wonderful they were and how their memories would be forever cherished. Don't you think?

Defence lawyer Peter Kemp, who represents Shafia, asked Mojab if the shame of a family would not be purified if an honour killer denied committing the murder. This is poorly worded, I'd say. I think he's asking if the family that denies conducting an honor killing is perhaps tainting the purpose? E.g., is honor restored if the family denies responsibility for the killing?

"But then there are many cases that, even after the father is imprisoned, they acknowledge that the act that was committed was to purify the name of the family."
In answer to another question, Mojab said an honour killing would still be considered to have cleansed the family's shame, even if the death was disguised as an accident.

So, she's saying that a convicted father who is imprisoned for an honor killing will admit to it after the prison sentence is imposed? But not before? And that lying is culturally sanctioned to protect families from the lawful consequences of a culturally sanctioned practice? Why or how did a law against a practice that everyone supports get enacted? Is the Koran so flexible about lies?

Whisper

December 6th, 2011, 02:35 PM

really good video here

http://en.video.canoe.tv/archive/shafia-murder-trial-update-december-6-2011/1311824881001

the defence has asked for a 2 day break before they start their side

Tundratot

December 6th, 2011, 07:27 PM

The practice is growing world wide as people from those Arab cultural regions emigrate outward. Not surprising, really, since their youth will be ready to pick up the practices of the local cultures and those parents just won't.

As to the fact that the professor ascribes this across religions, I think that's because there are and have been many religions present in the Middle East. The growth of Muslim fundamentalism and the expansion of Arab culture into previously non-Arab parts of the Middle East has resulted in pushing out people of other religions. Sometimes it's easy to forget the the culture and the religion aren't the same.

VXIII

December 7th, 2011, 05:19 AM

“The world is very large, it’s so large that one day I could even lose you. But in this world, as large as it is, know there’s a small heart, and you can never get lost in that heart, because it’s only for you, my love.”

Those are the most beautiful words I have ever heard, I hope Sahar heard them too...

VXIII

December 7th, 2011, 05:56 AM

In their words, may the devil shit on Shafias, Hameds and Toobas graves, and take a piss on it too, I hate these assholes...

Whisper

December 7th, 2011, 02:19 PM

You know I was watching a video of them walking and hes a short little puke and Im enjoying the fact that hes going to be in prison with guys that hate men like him
Foreign men that come here and pull their shit
Hes in our murderers prison right now and Paul Bernardo is in there too,they are holding he and his son there

Tundratot

December 7th, 2011, 03:23 PM

You know I was watching a video of them walking and hes a short little pukeI was noticing the same thing. He was dwarfed by those officers.

Whisper

December 7th, 2011, 03:26 PM

I was noticing the same thing. He was dwarfed by those officers.

yeah he may have had power over them from long term abuse
And when hes sentenced hes going to see what powerless is all about when he becomes bubbas bitch
Hes maybe 5 feet tall.im 5 feet and believe me I get a sore neck looking up hes in for a world of pain
My friend thats a lawyer said he will do everyday of those 25 years(limit here in Canada) we need DP back here
Theres talk of it

Whisper

December 7th, 2011, 08:51 PM

Will Shafias take stand

Whether to put their clients on the witness stand is the question defence attorneys are mulling today as they put the final touches on their preparations in the Kingston Mills murder trial.
Peter Kemp, representing Mohammad Shafia, is first up on Thursday.
Kemp was not available for comment Tuesday, but he indicated Monday his first witness will likely be on the stand for two full days, Thursday and Friday. Kemp told the court he needed two days to prepare for that witness and that his work involved a trip to Quinte Detention Centre.
[...]
Kemp said he expects to continue on Monday and Tuesday with two more key witnesses, as well as two "peripheral" witnesses.
Are there advantages to calling the accused to testify murder trials?
"That's a hard thing to say," says Queen's University criminal law professor Don Stuart. "Counsel in a joint trial like this has to be mindful all along of what evidence has been brought in against his client."
What's important to remember, noted Stuart, is Canadian law stipulates that jurors cannot consider innocence or guilt based on whether the accused testifies.
"We're not supposed to draw an adverse inference against someone who doesn't testify," he said. "That's the law."
Two important questions arise over the possibility of Shafia testifying: Can he handle the stress? And what would he say in his own defence?
The 58-year-old businessman was suddenly absent from the courtroom the morning of Nov. 3.
The night before, he had been taken to hospital in Napanee with what the presiding judge, Justice Robert Maranger, described as a "fairly serious" medical emergency.
"Yesterday was stressful for him," Kemp acknowledged at the time.
The outlook for the trial continuing in the near future looked bleak that morning.
The following week, however, Shafia was back in the prisoners' box, the nature of his sudden and mysterious ailment never revealed.
Two weeks after that, the court heard that Shafia had experienced a previous medical episode on the day his daughters were buried in Montreal.
Kingston Police Det. Steve Koopman attended the funerals on July 5, 2009. Koopman told the court that he had noticed an ambulance following the ceremony.
Talking later to Hamed, he learned that Mohammad had been taken to hospital with a suspected "small heart attack."
The officer said the medical matter was never raised again.
Shafia has been largely unemotional during the trial. On a few occasions, he has wept listening to video testimony involving Tooba and mention of his children.
Shafia himself has appeared twice at the trial — in a videotaped interview in June 2009 and an interrogation session with police after his arrest that July.
During the interrogation, Shafia tells a police officer his "life has been ruined" by the deaths, and professes "my kids, I loved them with my heart."
[...]
In all of the video interrogations shown so far, only Tooba has placed all three of them at Kingston Mills in the early hours of June 30.
However, as Justice Maranger has told the jury, statements made by any of the accused in video recordings can only be used as evidence against that person.http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3395746

Whisper

December 7th, 2011, 08:52 PM

Canadian Imams to condemn honor killings in Friday prayers
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/315697#ixzz1ftrWpqUo

Nell

December 8th, 2011, 01:38 AM

I think that Sahar may have seen all the others being killed and gave up. That would explain her not having any head trauma. They could not drown all of them at once, so someone had to be last. She probably told them not to do that to her, that she wouldn't try to get out of the car. And why would she? She was alone in the world with them dead.

VXIII

December 8th, 2011, 03:21 AM

If I read it correctly they had rooms 18 and 19, it could have been so easy to call them in one at a time and hold their heads under the bathtub which could easily explain the bruises on their heads, from them struggling and hitting their heads on the tub faucet, Sahar was so beaten down she may have just welcomed her death, I dont know but this story makes me very sad, especially for little Geeti, she knew, she knew as a 13 yr old what was going to happen, she tried to get herself out of it but couldnt, these are evil people and I dont hate too many people but I hate them and especially Tooba for letting her daughters, her own children be killed then lied and I feel for Rona, the 1st wife was so giving and kind enough when she could have children to choose her to be a 2nd wife and then Tooba turned on her, I know I could never be that giving and kind to share my husband with another but hey, thats their culture and I wont judge, I will say it again, if there is a devil, may he shit and piss on their graves and only sunshine and clean rain falls on the 4 womens graves. Rona was beautiful, too beautiful Ive seen the wedding pic to be married to that ugly fucker.

I will get on my knees and thank someone that I wasnt born into this society because they would have killed me long ago, because i am a selfish bitch and do as I please, they werent even selfish. Next "Evil Women: episode I want to see is Tooba, hope her daughter she cried over learns to hate her... Her son is already going to be someones dicksucking bitch. :eviltongue:

Whisper

December 8th, 2011, 03:39 PM

BOO FUCKING HOOO HES SO FUCKING FULL OF SHIT
This is just an update from noon
Shafia dad testifies he never interfered in daughters' lives

Mohammad Shafia, accused along with two other family members of killing his first wife and three daughters, told a Kingston, Ont., court Thursday he did not interfere in his children's lives.
Shafia, 58, the first witness for the defence in the lengthy trial, has pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder, as have the other accused, his 41-year-old wife, Tooba Yahya, and their 20-year-old son, Hamed.
Shafia, during his first day testifying, described how he fled his native Afghanistan to protect his family.
"We were a liberal family," he said. "And the women were in constant danger from the Taliban."
At one point, Shafia broke down in tears when asked about the marriage of his daughter Zainab, one of the victims.
He said he advised Zainab not to marry her boyfriend because he did not think he was "good." Zainab later married him, but the marriage was annulled within 24 hours.
Shafia was also questioned about his daughters' clothing choices.
He told the court he let his daughters dress as they liked and that he never forced them to wear the hijab.
"I never interfere in the clothing my children wear. It was up to them," he said.
[...]
The Crown alleges the sisters, two of whom were dating, were the victims of so-called honour killings
[..]
The prosecution alleges the slayings were sparked by the parents' anger over their girls' boyfriends, and how they dressed.
The defence went over some of the prosecution's wiretap evidence Thursday, asking Shafia to clarify what he meant at certain points.
In one recording, Shafia said, "Would a daughter be such a whore," and called for "the devil" to defecate "on their graves."
When asked by his lawyer what he meant, Shafia told the court he meant that the devil and God would be the ones to judge whether his daughters were bad or good.
Shafia also testified he sounded angry on the tapes because he felt betrayed after finding photographs of one of his daughters in revealing clothing.
He told the court he didn't find the pictures until after her death.
Crown prosecutors wrapped up their case on Monday with testimony from Shahrzad Mojab. She's a women's studies professor at the University of Toronto and an expert in so-called honour killings.
Mojab told the courtroom that in some cultures, honour is valued above human life.
This belief is seen predominantly in the Middle East, Mojab said.
When family honour is threatened, it is acceptable and expected that a male family member could kill a relative. http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/shafia-dad-testifies-he-never-interfered-in-daughters-lives-24

just give them to me for an hour,what a piece of shit cant wait to hear all about his first prison BF next year

Whisper

December 8th, 2011, 08:51 PM

'My children did a lot of cruelty toward me,' accused tells murder trial

KINGSTON, Ont. — A Montreal man accused of killing three of his teenage daughters and his first wife believed two of his children had been "cruel" to him by dressing in revealing clothes and consorting secretly with boyfriends, he told jurors at his murder trial Thursday.
"My children did a lot of cruelty toward me," Mohammad Shafia testified during questioning by his lawyer, Peter Kemp.
Shafia said he was angry when he saw a photo of one of his daughters in a short skirt, hugging a boyfriend she had secretly dated. He saw it after her death, he insisted.
"I was upset, I swore because I didn't expect this thing from my children," Shafia testified. "I was not happy about that."
Shafia said he expected that his children would have "consulted" him before making plans with boyfriends. He said he would have allowed the girls to marry boys of their choosing, even if he didn't approve of them.
[...]
Mohammad was Shafia's first wife. He married her in his native Afghanistan before the family moved to Canada in 2007. He passed her off as his cousin to bypass Canadian laws against polygamy.
[...]
Prosecutors allege the victims died in an honour killing, planned by Shafia because he felt his reputation had been tarnished. Jurors have heard that the three teenagers were defying family rules. Zainab ran away from home to a shelter and insisted on marrying a young Pakistani man. Shafia's first wife was asking for a divorce, an act that a cultural expert told the trial could provoke an honour killing. Geeti had asked child protection authorities to remove her from the home.
Just over half an hour into his daylong testimony, Shafia's face flushed red and he began to weep, the first of several such moments. He recounted Zainab's apology for running away and insisting on marrying someone Shafia said was "not a good boy."
hafia said he forgave her.
I said, 'Don't worry,' I gave her $100 and I kiss her face," he said, wiping away tears. "I didn't say anything else to her."
Kemp led Shafia through accusations made against him by some of the nearly 50 prosecution witnesses who testified in the previous 25 days.
Shafia denied abusing his first wife, despite the claims of several of her siblings who testified. He said Mohammad had never asked for a divorce.
"Rona was happy with us," Shafia testified.
Shafia denied abusing his children. He said he hit two of his children on one occasion, one evening in April 2009, when four of the children came home late.
"I slapped them once in my life," he testified. "I slapped them in the face only once . . . and I did not hit anyone else." Shafia said he also swore at another one of the children that evening.
Shafia was asked by Kemp to explain a conversation with Yahya, secretly recorded by police, in which he talked of his dead children and said, "May the devil shit on their graves."
Shafia said he meant that the devil should "check" their graves and God would decide their fate.
In another conversation he was recorded saying that if they came back to life a 100 times, he would "do it again." Shafia testified that he meant he would try to prevent them from doing bad things by giving them good advice.
Shafia dismissed the claim of Fazil Javid, Yahya's brother, who testified that Shafia asked him, in a phone conversation, to help kill Zainab in Sweden.
Shafia said he got a call from Javid, but because of long-standing enmity between the two men, he hung up.
"I did not even speak to Fazil," Shafia testified.
Shafia also denied speaking of killing Zainab in a conversation with Latif Hyderi, Yahya's uncle.
Shafia did not waver from his account of life in the Shafia home under questioning by prosecutor Laurie Lacelle.
He insisted he loved his children and both wives and that he had told police the truth about everything, except his lie that Mohammad was his cousin.
He said he had claimed she was a cousin for fear that their immigration application to Canada would be rejected.
He could not explain why he continued to claim she was his cousin, after her death.
Shafia was asked by Kemp if he had anything to do with the car ending up in the canal.
He repeated what he and Yahya said publicly days after the four deaths, that they had stopped in Kingston at a motel on the way home from a vacation in Niagara Falls and his oldest daughter Zainab took the car without permission. He awoke the next morning and discovered that the four family members were missing.
Shafia will be back on the witness stand Friday. http://www.canada.com/news/children+cruelty+toward+accused+tells+murder+trial/5830993/story.html#ixzz1fzfxb2Wb

fuck I hate these will knots

will knot

When little clumps of shit get caught in your ass hair, and they WILL NOT come out.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=will%20knot

Whisper

December 9th, 2011, 08:57 PM

Murder is no way to ‘regain your reputation,’ father accused in ‘honour killing’ trial testifies

KINGSTON, Ont. — The Montreal man accused of murdering four family members in an honour killing told jurors that his honour was important but killing his daughters and first wife would not restore it.
“My honour is important for me but . . . to kill someone, you can’t regain your reputation and honour,” Mohammad Shafia testified Friday, near the end of four hours of often accusatory questioning by prosecutor Laurie Lacelle. “Respected lady, you should know that in our culture and our religion, if someone kills his wife or daughter, there is no honourless person more than that person who committed that act.”
[..]
Prosecutors allege Shafia was angry that his daughters defied him, took boyfriends and dressed in revealing clothes. Mohammad had asked for a divorce, the trial heard, though Shafia denied the claim. Shafia acknowledged, during questioning by Lacelle, that he had called his daughters Zainab and Sahar “whores” and “prostitutes” after he saw photos of them posing in bikinis or underwear or hugging boyfriends. He said he did not see the photos until after their deaths.
Shafia’s testimony was spread over two days and near the end of the cross-examination by Lacelle, she read back to him his words captured by a police bug, in which he said, “there’s no value of life without honour.”
“And that’s how you felt, wasn’t it?” Lacelle asked.
Shafia said yes, but insisted he never thought of killing his children.
Yes, I’m Muslim, I don’t deny that but I’m not a killer . . . I came here in order to train and educate my children, to take them to school, what happened, God knows,” he said, beginning to cry.
Lacelle noted that after his arrest, while sitting in a police vehicle, he told Hamed: “We haven’t done anything wrong, they did it themselves.”
“You believed that their actions brought about their rightful deaths,” Lacelle said.
“Yes,” Shafia answered. Earlier in his testimony, he said he believed that everyone’s death is pre-determined and is in the hands of God.
Shafia testified that his 10-member family, travelling in two cars, stopped in Kingston in the early morning of June 30, while driving home from a vacation in Niagara Falls, Ont. They rented two rooms in a motel and then his daughter Zainab asked for the keys to the Sentra. Shafia said when he awoke the next morning, the car and the four family members were missing.

Cellphone records show that a call was made at 7:01 a.m. to Sahar’s cellphone. Shafia said he called, in an effort to locate the missing group. When he got no answer, he called his son, Hamed, who had driven home to Montreal in the other family vehicle. He also didn’t know where they were.
Shafia said “my worry was increasing” as time passed.
Lacelle noted Shafia didn’t call Sahar’s phone again and the family did not go to police to report the group missing until 12:30 p.m..

“Sir, you say you were worried about your missing family members but between 7 o’clock in the morning and 12:30 p.m. you made exactly one phone call to Sahar’s cellphone,” Lacelle said.
Sanchez. The two talked of moving to Honduras, he testified.
“I think I called once or twice,” Shafia said.
“You didn’t keep calling to see if she would answer,” Lacelle noted.
Shafia said he told his son Hamed to come back to Kingston. He testified that he wasn’t able to call police or ask motel staff if they had seen the missing family members because he doesn’t speak English fluently and was waiting for Hamed, who speaks English, to return to Kingston.
Lacelle noted that Shafia didn’t wake his English-speaking children who were with him.
“No,” Shafia said, without offering an explanation.
Lacelle spent more than 10 minutes quizzing Shafia about his revelation that during the family’s vacation in Niagara Falls, he drove back toward Montreal alone on June 27, 2009, and took a call on Hamed’s cellphone, which was in the vehicle. It was Sahar, he said, calling to say the entire family wanted to go home. Shafia said he happened to take the call in the Kingston area. He immediately turned around and drove back to Niagara Falls.
Lacelle said that during Shafia’s interrogation after his arrest, when confronted with cellphone records that revealed Hamed’s phone was in the Kingston area on June 27, Shafia told a police officer that he and Hamed had made the more than six-hour trip from Niagara Falls to Montreal some time between June 24 and June 29.
Shafia testified Friday that he and Hamed “might have” have driven to Montreal between those dates, in addition to the June 27 trip he made alone.
“That’s something that you never told us either yesterday or in your previous interviews,” Lacelle noted.http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/09/murder-is-no-way-to-regain-your-reputation-father-accused-in-honour-killing-trial-testifies/

http://i41.tinypic.com/doaou0.jpg

Sahar Shafia with Ricardo Sanchez. The two talked of moving to Honduras, he testified..

cant wait until his chosen son is the chosen bitch of the cell block!!

Whisper

December 9th, 2011, 09:07 PM

http://i43.tinypic.com/faaonn.jpg

Geeti Shafia asked for “immediate placement” with a foster family, when she spoke to a police officer weeks before her death. “She said she had no freedom; she wanted to be like her friends.”.

Christie Blatchford: Father accused in ‘honour killing’ trial makes his pitch for world’s greatest dad

Father of the year: This, ultimately, is the face Afghan businessman Mohammad Shafia has turned to Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and the jurors presiding at his murder trial.

As he told prosecutor Laurie Lacelle once, looking imploringly towards the jury box as he described his concern about his eldest daughter’s choice of a husband, “Respected lady, whoever has a young daughter here, I’m sure they would make sure they marry a good boy.”
Accused with his second wife and oldest son of what prosecutors allege was the mass “honour killing” of three teenage daughters and his barren first wife, the 58-year-old Mr. Shafia took the witness stand in his own defence Thursday.

There, occasionally holding up a large white handkerchief to catch his tears, he attempted to paint a picture of himself as a loving, liberal-minded, generous patriarch — a bit of a free spirit even, prone to handing out money and kisses — whose only wish for his children was happiness.

He was taken through his evidence by his lawyer, Peter Kemp, and in short order, denied there was any real discord in the household or that he was a tyrant who, when travelling abroad, used his oldest son as his lieutenant on the home front.

The critical denial at the end of Mr. Kemp’s examination-in-chief — “Did you have anything to do with it?” meaning the deaths — was bizarre, or as lawyers say, non-responsive to the question.

Mr. Shafia replied he didn’t even know the area where his family died until the police had showed him afterwards, this despite the fact that at the start of his testimony, just two hours earlier, he said the family had been there at least twice before on stopovers during holiday trips.
On June 30, 2009, the bodies of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, then respectively 19, 17 and 13, and their 52-year-old “aunt” Rona Amir Mohammad, who was in fact Mr. Shafia’s closeted first wife, were found in a submerged black Nissan at the bottom of the Kingston Mills locks just outside this eastern Ontario city.

Mr. Shafia, his second wife, 41-year-old Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their son Hamed, now 20, are all pleading not guilty to four counts each of first-degree murder.

Mr. Shafia’s greatest challenge may have been to explain the incendiary comment he made about his dead daughters in a conversation captured on Kingston Police wiretaps.

“May the Devil shit on their graves!” is what Mr. Shafia famously said.

Despite Mr. Kemp’s best efforts to have him say this was just a common old refrain back in Kabul, Mr. Shafia missed the bald hints and instead explained, “To me, it means the Devil will go out and check with them in their graves, and if they have done a good thing or a bad thing, it would be up to God.”

To Patrick McCann, who represents Hamed and asked, “Is that a common term for Afghans to use when angry?” Mr. Shafia dutifully replied “Yes.”

And to Ms. Lacelle, who noted that despite his claims to have forgiven Zainab her various transgressions, “if you said the Devil should shit on her grave, you still hadn’t forgiven her” Mr. Shafia insisted he had. “I gave her money, I kissed her face,” he said.

His testimony, clear as mud in every regard, stood in sharp contrast to the evidence of virtually every other witness who has testified at trial and to his own vicious utterings caught on the wiretaps.
From family relatives to strangers to professionals, from police in Montreal, where the family lived, to the girls’ teachers to the ineffective workers they called in from Quebec’s child-protection system, witness after witness has told the jurors that the four were riven with fear — afraid of Mr. Shafia, afraid of Hamed, afraid to leave, afraid to stay.

[...]
As an uncle, Latif Hyderi, once put it, the females in particular lived “like political prisoners.”

But Mr. Shafia denied all that and maintained that he knew only one, Zainab, who had run away in April that year and returned when promised she could marry her boyfriend, was unhappy.

On the wiretaps, in conversations with Ms. Yahya and Hamed in the family minivan, Mr. Shafia cursed his dead daughters as filth and whores and once cried that whenever he looked at the pictures of Sahar and Zainab, scantily clad posing with their boyfriends, “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.’ “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. By God!”

But Thursday, he maintained that what he meant by him “doing well” was merely that he had done his duty as a father and tried to guide his daughters onto “a straight path.”

Except for Zainab, whose treachery he knew about, he said he believed until their deaths that Sahar and Geeti had been good girls. Only after they died, he said, did he discover the pictures of Sahar with her boyfriend, and learn the full story of Geeti’s acting out at school.

Ms. Lacelle pounced.

If he didn’t know about the younger girls’ misbehaviour, and hadn’t spoken to them to correct their conduct, then what did he mean about having done well?

“You were talking about having killed them,” she said flatly.
No, no,” Mr. Shafia replied.

Ms. Lacelle will continue her cross-examination Friday.

It is a formidable enough task, made more difficult here by the fact that every word is translated from Farsi to English and back again, which allows for long pauses and for the witness to request questions be repeated.

And Mr. Shafia, in addition to being an exemplary father, if only by his own measure, is also a shameless brown-noser (“the police in this country is like family,” he said once cheerfully), compulsively flowery (“Dear lady” and “Respected lady” is how he addressed Ms. Lacelle), and the sort of fellow who is able to claim, when faced with a mound of pictures of himself with a chocolate-covered face, that he never touches the stuff, never has and never will.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/12/08/christie-blatchford-father-in-honour-killing-trial-makes-his-pitch-for-worlds-greatest-dad/

Tundratot

December 9th, 2011, 10:26 PM

His testimony, clear as mud in every regard, stood in sharp contrast to the evidence of virtually every other witness who has testified at trial and to his own vicious utterings caught on the wiretaps.
From family relatives to strangers to professionals, from police in Montreal, where the family lived, to the girls’ teachers to the ineffective workers they called in from Quebec’s child-protection system, witness after witness has told the jurors that the four were riven with fear — afraid of Mr. Shafia, afraid of Hamed, afraid to leave, afraid to stay.
And Mr. Shafia, in addition to being an exemplary father, if only by his own measure, is also a shameless brown-noser (“the police in this country is like family,” he said once cheerfully), compulsively flowery (“Dear lady” and “Respected lady” is how he addressed Ms. Lacelle), and the sort of fellow who is able to claim, when faced with a mound of pictures of himself with a chocolate-covered face, that he never touches the stuff, never has and never will.

I love this reporter's editorial commentary interspersed with the coverage. She definitely has a point of view and no compunction about voicing it.

Unfortunately, I think some of things that so offend her are typically Middle Eastern. Machiavellian thinking, even Byzantine, is very common. Flowery speech, check. Obsequiousness, check. Telling people what is expedient, check.

Whisper

December 9th, 2011, 10:32 PM

I love this reporter's editorial commentary interspersed with the coverage. She definitely has a point of view and no compunction about voicing it.

Unfortunately, I think some of things that so offend her are typically Middle Eastern. Machiavellian thinking, even Byzantine, is very common. Flowery speech, check. Obsequiousness, check. Telling people what is expedient, check.

I had written a paragraph about her but my Gbaby kinda knocked it off and Im to tired to rewrite it but I love her I read her everynight and she just puts it like it is

Whisper

December 9th, 2011, 10:38 PM

Rockin Ma

December 10th, 2011, 08:22 AM

I wanna say this nicely as to not insult anyone
But hes has pissed alot off here,coming here pulling his shit that in his country wouldve flown under the radar
People are tired of these guys coming here ,pulling crap then bad mouthing our country
Stay home in your country if you want to treat your women and daughters like she is dirt b.c here it wont fly

It makes no sense to me. The two countries are so different it just isn't reasonable to me relocate and keep the same way of thinking. I kinda don't think his "Honor" had anything to do with it other than him being disgusted at how Canadianized his family had become and them enjoying freedoms against his say so. For the most part people relocate for a better life. They choose the other country for that and want to be like the people of the country. It would be impossible for me to become an Afghan, but if I lived there, I would have to adapt to their way of life. These girls just wanted to be normal in their surroundings. In that house they lived like they were in their home country, but just out the window the better, free life was dangled just out of their grasps, but open to gaze at.

VXIII

December 10th, 2011, 07:53 PM

You know when I was a kid I used to read Arabian Nights and see movies etc and I loved their culture, it seemed so colorful, beautiful and peaceful sometimes, at least how I perceived it, it seemed as though it would have felt very safe to be protected and cared for in the stories I read about and saw, never did I know until maybe 5 years or so ago, that it is more like an imprisonment. That was the extent of my knowledge of Muslims before and I admired Salahadin as a great man, still do I think for some of the things he did. There is a new show coming on soon, think its called American Muslim or something, hopefully I can catch it because I am sure or want to believe that this family is not a typical family, that they arent all like this, that some families are actually very loving and kind to ALL of their children like I read about in Arabian Nights,

Like Rockin Ma said, I just dont see how he thought his children would not be influenced and expected to keep to Aphgans way of life. Does anyone know how long they had been living in Canada?

Whisper

December 10th, 2011, 08:49 PM

KINGSTON, Ont. - In the mano-a-mano contest which lies at the heart of any cross-examination, Mohammad Shafia has had his butt handed to him by a girl prosecutor.

The 58-year-old Afghan patriarch accused of murder in the deaths of almost half his family finished testifying in his own defence Friday.

But while Shafia continued to deny killing his three daughters and barren first wife, he was nonetheless painted into numerous corners by assistant Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle, who used Shafia's own words as her chief weapon.

He, his 41-year-old second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their eldest son Hamed, now 20, are all pleading not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of the four.
[...]
A key admission came when Lacelle, using Shafia's conversations on Kingston Police wiretaps, quoted him telling Hamed on the day of their arrest that July that ``we haven't done anything wrong. They (the dead women) did it themselves.''

``Indeed,'' Shafia replied.

``You believe their actions brought about their rightful deaths?'' Lacelle asked.

``Yes,'' Shafia said.

He went on to say that the girls' lies to him and secrets they kept from him - the eldest had run away from home and Sahar had a boyfriend - amounted to a betrayal.

``You believed your daughters deserved to die for their treachery?'' Lacelle asked.

``That's up to God,'' Shafia snapped. ``What they did, for us (the family) they were not deserving.''

``Their treachery brought dishonour to you and your family?'' she persisted.

``We believe in that,'' Shafia agreed.

Again throwing his words back at him, Lacelle asked, ``You had a choice - to accept what they did, or kill them?''

``Not,'' said Shafia.

``And you chose to kill them?''

``I never do some things to my children,'' he said, ``and I love them more than my own body.''

At another point, after Lacelle again accused Shafia of killing the four, he said, ``Dear respected lady, we never give ourselves the permission to do that. Our Qur'an does not allow ourselves to do that . . .

``How could someone do that?'' he asked.

``You might do it if you thought they were whores,'' the prosecutor smoothly replied, a reference to Shafia's repeated cursing of his dead daughters as ``filth'' and ``whores'' on the wiretaps.

``Respected lady,'' he said, ``that was only Zainab, and Sahar, that later I learned. The others were innocents. It's impossible.''

As his words on the wiretaps had revealed him as an unforgiving man, so did his words in testimony show him as a ruthless father who at the least was gloating at the fate meted out to his disobedient family.

In another skilful exchange, Lacelle took Shafia through the chats he, Yahya and Hamed had in their minivan the day police took them to the ``accident scene'' just outside this eastern Ontario city.

Though the trio clearly believed they were speaking privately, detectives had planted a bug in the van, and then pretended to have spotted a small camera at the water's edge - it was a ruse - where the Nissan had gone into the canal.

First, the prosecutor got Shafia to agree that he and Yahya were at that moment grieving parents, Hamed a grieving brother.

``You must have been relieved to hear police had located a camera?'' she asked.

``Yes,'' said Shafia. ``I got relaxed.''

``You wanted them to get as much evidence as possible?'' Lacelle asked.

``Yes,'' he replied.

``So why do your private conversations that day show you were anything but happy?'' she asked cheerfully.

Shafia asked for the question to be repeated by the translators.

``The conversations do not show you were happy police had found a camera,'' Lacelle said.

``I was happy at everything they found,'' Shafia insisted.

In fact, the wiretaps show the trio were in full panic - and markedly lacking in anything remotely resembling grief.

Yahya at one point said, ``There was no camera over there. I looked around, there wasn't any. If, God forbid, God forbid, there was one in that little house, all three of us would have come, no?'' And Shafia reassured her by saying, ``That night, there was no electricity there, everywhere was pitch darkness, you remember Tooba?''

Shafia agreed the conversation had happened, but insisted that ``I said it would be good.''

He said nothing of the sort, as Lacelle pointed out to him.

``Hamed says, `They said they want to see if the camera has recorded anything or not. They said there's a camera near the water.' You say, `They're lying. If there was a camera, they'd access it in a minute.'

``That's an expression of happiness that they found a camera?'' Lacelle asked mildly.

``This is what I meant,'' Shafia said. ``It would be good.''

It was a remarkably deft cross-examination of a witness alternately condescending and sly, who hid behind the complications of language and translation, and who could - and did - make himself weep.

When, for instance, Lacelle was reading his own words, post-arrest, back to him - he was then hectoring a worried Hamed about the importance of ``honour'' - Shafia agreed that he linked his honour with his daughters' rebellious behaviour.

``I said that, yes,'' he said, then launched into one of his not infrequent soliloquies.

During it, he said that while ``my honour is important to me, to kill someone, you can't regain your reputation and honour (that way). Dear lady, you should know that . . .'' and then added, ``I would never even think this way, to go and kill my children. I'm a Muslim, yes, but I'm not a killer and I don't kill.''

He was crying when he finished. It is too much to expect he was aware of the score - dear respected lady 1, Afghan man, 0.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Blatchford+Prosecutor+mops+floor+with+accused+fath er+Shafia+murder+trial/5839261/story.html#ixzz1gBOCexy0

Whisper

December 10th, 2011, 08:50 PM

Shafia trial reflects badly on community, GTA Muslims say 0
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/12/09/shafia-trial-reflects-badly-on-community-gta-muslims-say

Tundratot

December 10th, 2011, 09:00 PM

VXIII Never fear, the place and the culture where the Arabian Nights took place was very different. It would be as foreign to the modern day Arabs as Renaissance England would be to us.

Of course, the basic story had it that Scheherazade told those stories to keep from being killed the next morning. She'd stop telling the story in the middle and tell the rest the next night. The king wouldn't kill her until he heard the rest of the story. Of course, she'd begin a new story and stop in the middle, again. So, even then a woman's life was very cheap.

Whisper

December 11th, 2011, 08:58 PM

Mallick: Happy family masquerade

You wouldn’t think Tooba Mohammad Yahya, a 41-year-old Afghan mother of seven, and Dottie Sandusky, a 68-year-old Pennsylvania mother of six, have a lot in common. But truly they are sisters under the skin.

Yahya is on trial in Kingston, co-accused with her glowering husband Mohammad Shafia of first-degree murder after their three young daughters and the husband’s first wife were found dead in the Rideau Canal. The dead were extremely beautiful girls and women hoping to build a new, free life in Canada. Their father is a tyrant and a brute.

Dottie is married to Jerry Sandusky, a famous Penn State University football coach accused of a lifetime of raping young boys. He is out on bail again after a second wave of sexual abuse charges. Two more young men now say he molested them, sometimes in his own home while Dottie was there.

One boy, kept and fed in a basement bedroom, told a grand jury he screamed for help because he knew Dottie was upstairs. “But no one ever came to help,” the grand jury report says.

Dottie and Jerry couldn’t have children of their own. So they adopted six. As Jerry Sandusky says in his oddly titled autobiography, Touched, Dottie oversaw a house filled to the brim with children, their friends, and kids from the children’s charity he set up.

“We don’t know why anyone would make such a terrible accusation which is absolutely untrue,” Dottie said Thursday. “Our children, our extended family and friends know how much Jerry and I love kids.”

Dottie has not been charged with anything. Equally, Yahya is innocent until proven guilty.

Aren’t they nice though, these two? They created families for moneyed, strutting men who ran the show. Without income of their own and a status derived only from wife-and-motherhood, they relied entirely on their husbands. Yahya was handy at giving birth, Dottie was handy as the maternal figure who made it plausible for a man to spend every hour of the day within a few feet of young boys eating, sleeping, playing, “showering and horsing around,” as Sandusky put it in a sinister phone interview recently.

A wife is like a coat of white paint. She covers up a multitude of sins.

I have looked with disgust at men who tortured and killed their young captives, men like Paul Bernardo and Fred West. But I have looked with amazement at their female partners, Karla Homolka and Rosemary West, who were helpmeets and later claimed to be victims, too. There is never any shortage of them.

Mothers are often passive partners in the abuse that goes on in their home, the abuse that seems obvious post-arrest but was previously unthinkable because there was a loving mother in the house.

Audrey Ricker, author of The Ultimate Betrayal: The Enabling Mother, Incest and Sexual Abuse, has treated victims of sexual abuse for decades. She sees a consistent pattern — obviously there are exceptions — among the mothers in incest cases. They refuse to interfere (often pretending to be asleep when Dad leaves the bedroom or the house), defend the father and continue to pretend the family is flawless, imply the victim “asked for it,” and deny the maternal love that would offer the victim an emotional refuge.

For defending the child would mean upsetting the family apple cart. The mother would need a divorce, a new home, a job. Manless, she would be poor and shunned. How sad that would be for women like Dottie and Tooba.

I still don’t understand why the Shafia case is being prosecuted as an “honour killing.” It should be called a “shame killing.”

[...]
It isn’t always entirely a man’s “shame” that inspires such hideous acts. A woman’s fear of disgrace fuels them, too.

Look at the faces of Tooba and Dottie, mothers to so many little children but who were mysteriously not present at crucial moments. The sound of a slap. A thin cry from a distant room. But who’s to hear?http://www.thestar.com/article/1100085--mallick-happy-family-masquerade

Tundratot

December 11th, 2011, 09:22 PM

If that accusation is true about Dottie Sandusky ignoring a child locked up the basement, I'm all for hanging her out to dry. Heinous bitch.

Whisper

December 12th, 2011, 12:24 AM

VXIII

December 12th, 2011, 03:46 AM

Whisper

December 12th, 2011, 03:07 PM

I have been thinking about that also, the water from the tub would be different from the water in the locks and havent they tested their lungs? I dont remember reading anything about it being tested. I know a lot of times evidence is supressed too which doesnt give a jury a full view of what happened, Id want to know everything so its possible they have this info and just arent letting it out yet.

I havent seen anyplace either where its been tested and there has to be a test for that
I know theres really no CSI but that to me would be a basic test
Hopefully they are holding that out for the ending but to me it just seems like it would be such a simple thing to eliminate or justify
I over think and analyze shit to much though sometimes
My old boss I had for years and years used to laugh and tell me that I over think things and am to smart for my own good sometimes and it would one day get me into trouble
I was like 23 years old and he was right its gotten me into shit over the years just analyzing things and thinking to much on one thing

VXIII

December 12th, 2011, 03:26 PM

I know exactly what you mean, I do the same thing...

Whisper

December 12th, 2011, 09:19 PM

Shafia sibling testifying in parents' murder trial

The trial of a Montreal family accused of killing four other family members continues today in Kingston, with a sibling of the three girls who were found dead testifying as a defence witness.
CTV's Genevieve Beauchemin, who is at the Kingston courthouse to report on the trial, explains there's a publication ban on the identity of the sibling.
"But what I can tell you is that it was the first time, when he walked into the courtroom, that he saw Mohammad Shafia, Tooba and Hamed, and it was quite an emotional moment," she told CTV News Channel Monday morning.
The jury were asked to watched a videotaped interview that police conducted with the sibling before his parents and brother were arrested in July 2009. In the taped interview, the sibling conceded that his father had hit them a few times, but was adamant that his family couldn't have possibly committed murder.
He tells the officer there is no way his family would have murdered his sisters and his father's first wife because killing someone is "sick." Besides, he says, he is the one who argued the most with his parents.
"So why not me?" he says. "That's the second thing which gets it off my mind."
[...]
While testifying Friday, Shafia conceded that his honour was important to him but would not be enough to compel him to kill.
"But you can't regain your honour with murder -- respected lady, you must know that," he told prosecutor Laurie Lacelle .
Shafia said the Qur'an does not give permission to kill people, so he and his family would therefore not have given themselves permission to do that.
"Never, respected lady, we never allow ourselves to do that," Shafia said in Dari through a court translator.
"Tooba is a mom… How is it possible that someone will do that to his or her children?"
Lacelle suggested Shafia might do so if he thought his daughters were "whores," a term he was heard using on a wiretap recording in reference to his dead children.
In response, Shafia said that term referred only to two of his daughters. The other two victims were innocent, he said.
"Nothing can cause this, that a person…do such a terrible and heinous thing," Shafia said. "It's impossible."
It's unclear whether Tooba Yahya or Hamed Shafia will testify. Beauchemin notes that each of the accused has his or her own defence lawyers. None chose to make opening statements to delineate how they will mount their defence. http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111212/shafia-murder-kingston-trial-111212/20111212/?hub=MontrealHome

Brother of Shafia girls refused to believe parents were killers

KINGSTON, Ont. – A brother of three Montreal teenagers found dead in a submerged car in 2009 told investigators he refused to believe his parents had murdered the girls and his aunt, the 52-year-old woman who was actually his father’s first wife, the jury at the Shafia murder trial heard Monday.

“I used to do the most (bad) stuff, so why not me?” the young man wonders in an interview with a Kingston police officer that was videotaped July 21, 2009.
[...]
The video was played in court Monday morning after the young man was called to testify as a defence witness. He wrote frequently on a written transcript of the interview while the tape was played for jurors. He was not asked any questions. A court order bars publication of his name.
[...]
The brother of the victims told police, in the July 21 interview, that the children had called police in April 2009 because they feared their father. Jurors already have heard that Montreal police were called to the Shafia home in St. Léonard on April 17, 2009, and were told that several of the children complained of abuse by their father and older brother.
He had given us some slaps,” the young man told a Kingston police officer in the videotaped interview.
The man said, on the tape, that he was slapped three or four times and two of his sisters were slapped.
He told the Kingston officer his father slapped him when he tried to intervene in the attacks on his sisters.
“I said, ‘You can’t touch us like that,’ ” he stated on the tape.
The boy said his father swore at him and told him to shut up.
His father was angry, he said, because the children had returned home at 9 p.m.
The young man also told the officer that he fell asleep in the vehicle on the evening of June 29, 2009, as the family drove home to Montreal from Niagara Falls. He said he was shaken awake by his father at 1:53 a.m. (he had checked the time), and got out of the vehicle and went into a motel room, where he immediately fell asleep.
When he awoke the next morning, he was told that four family members and the family’s other vehicle were missing. http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Brother+Shafia+girls+refused+believe+parents+were+ killers/5847524/story.html#ixzz1gNCYuvsD

Whisper

December 12th, 2011, 09:22 PM

Nothing in this trial is funny but everytime I read her name Yahya I think of that old man Jimmy Kimmel has on with Guirmo(sp)
Yahya joined him just before Uncle Frank died

ineedanap

December 12th, 2011, 11:01 PM

Shouldn't this be in the foreign crime thread???

Whisper

December 12th, 2011, 11:02 PM

Shouldn't this be in the foreign crime thread???

No Canada and States both go under Reality Bites,the rest are foreign crimes

VXIII

December 13th, 2011, 12:44 AM

Every evening I come looking for the update on this thread...

Whisper

December 13th, 2011, 03:21 PM

just a noon hour update

Shafia prosecutor questions sibling's explanation

The son of a Montreal couple accused of killing their three daughters faced withering cross-examination on Tuesday in a Kingston, Ont., court by the Crown prosecutor, who suggested the young man was attempting to cover up for his parents’ actions.
The name of the son cannot be released due to a publication ban. [...]
The prosecutor referred to wiretap evidence made by police the night before the family members were arrested, in which the young man asked his brother, “Shall I kill myself? You are 100 per cent caught.”
Ten days before the deaths, someone used the Shafia family computer to search "where to commit a murder."
On Monday, the young man testified that he was suicidal and may have mistakenly keyed in the search terms. "I think I wasn't familiar with the term suicide or suicidal, so I kind of thought murder meant the same thing," he said.
On Tuesday, the prosecutor asked, “Why didn’t you say, ‘Where to kill myself?’ instead of ‘Where to commit murder?’”
The brother had no answer, the CBC’s Dan Halton reported from the courthouse.
[...]
Jury hears interrogation video
On Monday, the jury trial watched a police interrogation video of the son who was called to testify. The video was recorded the night Shafia and his wife were arrested.
The son is asked whether there is trouble at home and he acknowledges arguments, describing one occasion where he was slapped repeatedly by Hamed and his father.
But in his testimony on Monday, he painted a somewhat different picture.
"Rona was basically like a second mother to all of us," he said of his father's first wife. He said she was very happy in the home, though court has heard from witnesses that she was afraid Shafia would kill her, and was constantly being humiliated by Yahya in front of the children and guests.
Sahar, too, was "very happy at home," he said, "happy, joyful, enjoying life."
Previously the court has heard from various teachers, vice-principals, police officers, social workers and youth protection workers, who testified about various tales the girls told them of verbal, emotional and physical abuse and their desperation to escape the home.
Sahar told some of those people she was afraid of her father and that Hamed pressured her to wear a hijab. The court heard she had essentially been shunned at home for eight months and was so upset that she tried to kill herself.
Those were all lies, the brother testified. The Shafia siblings, Sahar in particular, he said, would make up stories to elicit sympathy from their teachers so they could get away with skipping classes and obtaining poor marks.
Crown's cross-examination could be tough
Mohammad Shafia testified in his own defence last week and faced tough questions from Crown prosecutor Laurie Lacelle during cross-examination. Shafia told the court he values honour, but that there is no honour in killing.
Expert witnesses testified earlier in the trial that in some cultures, when family honour is threatened, it is acceptable that a male family member could kill a relative.
It's unclear whether Yahya or Hamed Shafia will be called by the defence to testify, according to the CBC's Daniel Halton.
The three accused each has a defence lawyer.
http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/shafia-prosecutor-questions-siblings-explanation

Tundratot

December 13th, 2011, 06:36 PM

They're all so busy throwing up dust to blind the jury. I wonder if they're having any success.

Pete Bondurant

December 13th, 2011, 06:43 PM

Whisper

December 13th, 2011, 07:35 PM

This is in Canada. These people, if they are convicted, will spend very little time in prison anyway. They might as well just plead guilty. They will probably be provided with new identities and a severance package upon release.

:laser: :canada:

Actually I was talking with one of my closest friends here and shes a lawyer and her hubbys a judge here in the city
These guys arent getting off,
its pretty well known in public and private sectors they are guilty
they will do everyday of the max sentence here and thats only 25 years not nearly enough
But day they are released they will be driven directly to waiting plane to deport them back to Afghanistan
We need DP here badly,
we need these fuckers that come here and pull their shit to be sentenced to laws from their country
They need to be buried up to their waists and stoned to death for costing the country all the money spent on this case
With him being a millionaire they will sue and get back all the money from his estate his children left here will be deported soon as the trials done b/c thankfully NONE of them became citizens here

Whisper

December 13th, 2011, 08:47 PM

Shafia son knew sisters' deaths were 'an accident,' murder trial told

KINGSTON, Ont. – The teenage boy whose three sisters were found dead in a submerged car in 2009 knew immediately their deaths were accidental, although he knew nothing about the police investigation, he told jurors at the Shafia murder trial on Tuesday.
I knew for a fact it was an accident,” the youth, now 18, testified during cross examination by crown prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis.
[....]
Prosecutors allege the deaths were an honour killing, arranged by Mohammad Shafia because he felt his daughters had shamed him by taking boyfriends, dressing in revealing clothes and disobeying him. Rona Mohammad reportedly wanted a divorce.
The accused, all residents of St. Léonard, have said they believe their rebellious daughter Zainab took the family car on a joyride without permission and crashed it into the canal. She did not have a driver’s licence.
A court order protects the name of the youth who testified Tuesday. He was called as a defence witness in the murder trial of his parents and his older brother. The Crown began questioning him Tuesday morning.
The witness testified he told police everything he knew because he wanted to help them explain the deaths. Laarhuis noted that in a conversation with the youth’s brother the morning before the arrests, the boy did not suggest anyone else could be responsible for the deaths. The conversation was secretly recorded by police.
“I don’t think anyone else is responsible for what happened to my sisters,” the boy responded. “It was an accident.”
He said he knew his parents would not do such a thing and he could not “think of anyone else who would.”
The youth said his sister Zainab secretly drove one of the family’s cars in Niagara Falls, Ont., while they were on vacation there in June 2009. He said she told him she was caught by her father.
Laarhius asked what punishment was meted out for this breach of family rules.
The youth said he didn’t know, although he has testified that he was very close to Zainab and they shared secrets.
All she told me was that Dad caught her,” he testified.
[...]
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+knew+sisters+deaths+were+accident+murder+tr ial+told/5852884/story.html#ixzz1gSuvV1fc

VXIII

December 13th, 2011, 11:30 PM

Shafia has those kids under control, he told them already what to say and they are following his directions...

sheevaa

December 13th, 2011, 11:46 PM

“I used to do the most (bad) stuff, so why not me?” the young man wonders in an interview with a Kingston police officer that was videotaped July 21, 2009.

Duh, you're male, you actually count for something to Daddy Shafia. Besides throwing up the smokescreen of what a happy household it was, depite the 20 other people who say it was shit.

Whisper

December 14th, 2011, 08:49 PM

Defence for Mohammed Shafia rests

The Shafia family murder trial has broken for the holidays, after the defence for the patriarch of the family rested its case. The defence for the two other accused begins next month.

After his testimony ended, the Shafia sibling used his last words in court to ask if he could say goodbye to his parents. The judge said they'd have to wait on that, so he left waving goodbye to them.

The witness, who can't be identified, once again denied he was covering up for his family, insisting he couldn't answer questions by police over two years, if they didn't ask them.

The two final witnesses testifying in the defence of the father, Mohammed Shafia, were eldest brother of his second wife and co-accused, as well as a business partner in Canada, originally from Afghanistan. [...]
The trial broke for the holiday period, with the lawyers for the mother and their oldest son presenting their cases early next month.http://www.cjad.com/CJADLocalNews/entry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10326984

Whisper

December 15th, 2011, 01:41 AM

Shafia son asks for hug after grilling in court

After a lengthy and withering cross-examination during which he was accused of conspiring with his family to fabricate alibis, a surviving son of a couple accused of killing three of their daughters finished his court testimony by asking for a hug.

The son of the Montreal couple testified this week for the defence at the Shafia family murder trial in Kingston, Ont. and was subject to more than a full day of cross-examination.

Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis accused him of having a highly selective memory, and recited a long list of “new information” offered during his testimony.

The sibling, who can’t be identified because of a publication ban, was re-examined by the defence Wednesday morning after being grilled by the Crown.

[..]
Defence lawyer Peter Kemp called the son back to the witness box to question him about his cross-examination testimony.

"You've been cross-examined quite extensively by Mr. Laarhuis with respect to a conspiracy or an agreement to fabricate evidence or make up evidence ... to help your parents and your brother," Kemp said. "What do you have to say about that?"

"That we helped in the murders, is that right?" the son said.

He and the rest of his family maintain the deaths were an accident, a late-night joy ride turned tragic.

Moments later, after the judge told him he could step down, the son turned to Judge Robert Maranger and asked if he could have permission to hug his parents goodbye.

Laarhuis referenced ongoing discussions about the matter, and said, "Now's not the time," causing the mother to burst into tears in the prisoner's box.

The court adjourned for the holidays just after 3 p.m. on Wednesday,with the trial scheduled to resume Jan. 9, 2012.

Crown argues testimony inconsistencies hiding truth

The prosecutor said the witness conveniently remembered details that aided his accused family members, but failed to recall anything that might hinder their defence, reported the CBC’s Dan Halton from the courthouse.

Laarhuis quoted the witness as saying his father was an 8.5 out of 10 on liberal values, and did not care what his children wore or insist that his daughters wear the hijab.

But the prosecutor showed the court the girls’ passport photos, health cards and Canadian residency cards, in which they were all pictured wearing the hijab. The witness maintained he had never seen them wearing the hijab.

Unreliable witness, prosecutor alleges

On Tuesday, the prosecutor suggested the young man had lied to and manipulated authority figures in the past and may not be telling the truth in court.

On Monday, the son testified he might have been responsible for one of the more apparently damning pieces of evidence against his family members. On June 20, 2009, just 10 days before the drowning deaths of his sisters and father's first wife, someone used the family computer to search "where to commit a murder."

The son said he was suicidal at the time, and though he doesn't remember entering that specific search, it might have been him because he didn't know the word for suicide.

He said he was suicidal because his eldest sister, Zainab, had run away to a shelter. But that was on April 17, 2009, and she returned home two weeks later, court has heard.

The computer search came on June 20, three days before the family left on a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont., that would end in the deaths on June 30. At that time, the witness testified he was happy and so was everyone else in the family. Life was good, he said.

Confusion about dates

The son appeared to get confused about the dates Tuesday and in an exchange of escalating tension with the Crown attorney, the son abruptly turned to the judge.

"Your honour, may I be excused to go to the washroom, please?" he said.

The court took a break and when Laarhuis returned to the topic later in the afternoon he started questioning the witness about how he could not know the word for suicide. The son suggested the search was a result of Google's auto-complete function, but Laarhuis noted those precise words were typed.

"It was after April 17th, right?" the son asked.

"No, you're wrong," Laarhuis replied. "It was during your happy period, the 20th [of June]. Do you want to change your testimony about that now?"

"No, not at all," the son said.

The witness has admitted manipulating teachers in the past by telling them lies and has admitted manipulating police in the past by telling them lies, Laarhuis said.

"So where do you draw the line on manipulating people and telling lies?" he asked. The son responded, "When it goes too far, I guess."

Crown alleges so-called honour killings
[...]
The son, and brother to the girls, was hammered by Laarhuis at another point about his statement to police that Zainab came to the motel room that night to borrow his cellphone.

Laarhuis suggested that never happened, and further, that inconsistent statements to police that it might have been his mother who wanted to borrow his phone point to a mistake on his part.

"I'm putting to you, that's where you're getting confused, because the story was supposed to be Zainab came and asked for keys, but you got confused," Laarhuis said. "You got mixed up and you said she came and asked for a cellphone."

The brother denied the suggestion.

He also denied that one of his roles in the family was to report back to his parents and Hamed on the behaviour of Sahar and Geeti at school.

But many of his answers during his cross-examination were unclear, which sometimes elicited chuckles from members of the public watching the trial.

At one point, he said he went to visit the site of the deaths once afterward, to see where his sisters had died. Laarhuis suggested he visited a second time, and the brother responded: "Uh, yes. I'm not sure. I don't recall. I don't remember it."

"You said yes ... What's that about?" Laarhuis asked.

"Maybe I was back there in Kingston, but not on the [specific] site," the brother said.

Laarhuis also suggested the family had stopped at the site of the deaths to use the washroom at the beginning of their trip, which the father had testified to last week, but the brother said he wasn't sure. He said he remembers stopping in a park, but wasn't clear if there was water at that park, saying, "Uh, yes. I don't know. I'm not sure."

He also denied several incidents involving his family that the court has heard other witnesses testify to, including his own father.

http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/shafia-son-asks-for-hug-after-grilling-in-court

VXIII

December 15th, 2011, 11:47 AM

:bawling: :bawling: After reading his testimony more carefully, Is anyone else thinking that the young Mr. Shafia that is the defendents witness likely played a major part in this but because of his age at the time they didnt do anything about it? He probobly had to stay behind to watch the younger kids but Im thinking this is probobly part of his upbringing as well, he may not have been there but I get the feeling he helped plan and knew all about it beforehand, wouldnt it be part of an afghani boys training to keep "unruly" women in line... :angry: (he would most likely be the one that saw Sahar and her bf in a restaraunt and demanded :secruity: to know "what is going on here"?) :bawling: I will be interested to see what the others say if they get on witness stand... Probobly the same shit but their slip ups in testimony reveal a lot, too bad Judge Judy isnt the judge here, she would get to the bottom of this shit real quick. :suspicious:

Does anyone know if the juveniles are in foster care or if they are with other family members? Too bad we have to wait until January for more... :bawling: :bawling: :bawling:

Tundratot

December 15th, 2011, 11:59 AM

Is anyone else thinking that the young Mr. Shafia that is the defendents witness likely played a major part in this but because of his age at the time they didnt do anything about it? He probobly had to stay behind to watch the younger kids but Im thinking this is probobly part of his upbringing as well, he may not have been there but I get the feeling he helped plan and knew all about it beforehand, wouldnt it be part of an afghani boys training to keep "unruly" women in line... (he would most likely be the one that saw Sahar and her bf in a restaraunt and demanded to know "what is going on here"?) I will be interested to see what the others say if they get on witness stand... Probobly the same type of thing but their slip ups in testimony reveal a lot, too bad Judge Judy isnt the judge here, she would get to the bottom of this shit real quick.

I'm not sure. But I do think this is the sibling that was making the girls' lives hell by reporting to the parents. He strikes me as a glib, smart-Alec.

VXIII

December 15th, 2011, 12:51 PM

:eek: Is anyone else thinking: :eek:

Shafia, Yahya and Hamed have told police that the night of the deaths Zainab came into their motel room to borrow the car keys The Crown alleges the now deceased children were killed before the family checked into the motel, and that they made up the story about the car keys to place the girls at the motel alive, which would fit with their assertion that the deaths were a joyride gone wrong.

I found this in Whisper's news article and now it is coming together, they could have done it on the way back at a remote, isolated and different body of water, a river, a lake somewhere out in the boonies, and drowned them there. That could be why Tooba had to wait on side of the road for Shafia and Hamed to find hotel rooms... (could be why she was ill also) :eek::eek::eek:

If this is the case the entire family knew, everyone of them.... cant have dead women checking into hotels or carrying bodies inside. That also could be why Hamed and Shafia were unsure while checking in with manager at the hotel about how many would be checking in (to the confusion of the manager) we read this info from another article that Whisper posted a while back....

http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/shafia-son-asks-for-hug-after-grilling-in-court

Whisper

December 15th, 2011, 02:26 PM

:eek: Is anyone else thinking: :eek:

I found this in Whisper's news article and now it is coming together, they could have done it on the way back at a remote, isolated and different body of water, a river, a lake somewhere out in the boonies, and drowned them there. That could be why Tooba had to wait on side of the road for Shafia and Hamed to find hotel rooms... (could be why she was ill also) :eek::eek::eek:

If this is the case the entire family knew, everyone of them.... cant have dead women checking into hotels or carrying bodies inside. That also could be why Hamed and Shafia were unsure while checking in with manager at the hotel about how many would be checking in (to the confusion of the manager) we read this info from another article that Whisper posted a while back....

http://news.ca.msn.com/canada/shafia-son-asks-for-hug-after-grilling-in-court

Im hoping eventually somewhere in this mess they have security video of the cars pulling up and whos in them at the motel
BUT
Now that Ive said that a light just came on in my head
The reason they waited at the side of the road could be for the fact Hamed and Shafia were intentionally looking for a cheapo motel with no security cameras
They were positive there were none at the canal b.c they checked it to make sure
I bet they did the same with a motel
Im dying to know how many motels were between where they waited on the road and where they finally got rooms
I fucking hate this pack of shits

Whisper

December 15th, 2011, 08:48 PM

Shafia trial: No coverup in ‘honour killings,’ son testifieshttp://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Shafia+trial+coverup+honour+killings+testifies/5860412/story.html#ixzz1gecCQP32

Shafia murder trial adjourns until the new year
Shafia trial adjourns until the new year
http://www.torontosun.com/2011/12/14/shafia-murder-trial-adjourns-until-the-new-year

Honour killings 'reprehensible': Imam
http://www.lfpress.com/news/canada/2011/12/15/19129866.html

Discrepancies cited in testimony of key witness in ‘honour killings’ trial
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/discrepancies-cited-in-testimony-of-key-witness-in-honour-killings-trial/article2271037/

HeatherHabilatory

December 16th, 2011, 03:31 AM

Could they have sustained the bruises on their backs by the car being pushed backward into the lock?

I'm sure it's been asked I just can't find if it has.

Whisper

December 16th, 2011, 03:42 AM

Could they have sustained the bruises on their backs by the car being pushed backward into the lock?

I'm sure it's been asked I just can't find if it has.

Actually the car went in forwards not backwards,the SUV pushed it in

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

“There was certain damage present on the Nissan and there was certain damage present on the Lexus SUV that coincide and it’s my opinion that the Lexus was used to push the Nissan over the edge of the canal into the water,” Prent testified
[...]
.
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+Trial+Victims+pushed+into+canal+trial+told/5610532/story.html#ixzz1ggIaPK2N

Whisper

December 16th, 2011, 09:18 PM

Christie Blatchford: Death without honour: the Shafia trial so far
With three versions of events on the table, is truth found in any?

[...]
With the case now on a break for Christmas, a short refresher course seems in order.

Shafia, his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their eldest son, Hamed, are pleading not guilty to four counts each of first-degree murder in the deaths of almost half their family.

Found in a submerged black Nis-san at an improbable location at the Kingston Mills locks the morning of June 30, 2009, were Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia - respectively 19, 17 and 13 - and their purported aunt, 52-year-old Rona Amir Mohammad. Amir was, in fact, Sha-fia's other wife, though she wasn't officially acknowledged that way in Canada, where polygamy is illegal.

Why does the media call it an "honour killing" trial?
First, the term isn't a media creation. It's the global shorthand for the phenomenon whereby girls and women deemed to have shamed their families, usually by dressing immodestly or being involved with boys, are killed by their male relatives.

As the prosecutors' expert witness, Dr. Shahzrad Mojab, told the jurors, in patriarchal, honour-based cultures such as Afghanistan's and in parts of the Middle East, "cleansing one's honour of shame is typically handled by the killing of a loved one." The victims are invariably female, the perpetrators usually male (often fathers and other male relatives) but sometimes they act with females or with female help.

In other words, the term doesn't mean the crime is honourable, but rather that it is, as is the allegation here, motivated by a distorted sense of honour.

How did the women die?
All four of them drowned. All but Sahar had areas of similar recent bruising - in Amir's case, it was significant - on the same place on the crowns of their heads. Geeti had additional bruising at her right shoulder.

Dr. Christopher Milroy, the forensic pathologist, testified there was no way to know where the four were drowned - in the Nissan or some-where else - or in what order or by what mechanism. Toxicological tests were negative for any known incapacitating drugs.

A curious aspect of the deaths is that though the driver's side window was fully open, none of the four women appears to have tried to escape the Nissan. The water where it was found was only a little more than two metres deep, or about six feet, 10 inches.

And among the oddities about the Nissan is the fact that the front seats were so fully reclined - they were almost flat - the car would have been difficult for many people to drive. The ignition was off and the automatic shifter was in first, or low, gear.
What evidence did the Crown present?

It falls into a couple of categories - forensic, testimony from witnesses and Kingston Police wiretaps.

In the first category are plastic pieces of a broken headlamp found at the locks that prove the Shafias' silver Lexus was there at the scene and that damage to the front of the Lexus matched damage done to the rear of the Nissan.

Also in this group are cellphone records that show the last text message received by Sahar's phone at 1: 36 a.m. on June 30 bounced off a cellphone tower at Station Road - it is the closest tower to Kingston Mills locks, just 1,300 metres away - and that, smack in the middle of the family's trip to Niagara Falls, Hamed's cellphone took a little trip to the Kingston area.

As for testimony, the strongest probably came from a dozen independent witnesses - teachers and officials at the girls' Montreal school, child-protection workers and Montreal Police - who told the jurors how fearful, sad and desperate to be out of the house were Sahar and Geeti.

As well, boyfriends of Sahar and Zainab also testified how controlled the girls were, how Hamed and other siblings monitored their movements. And an Afghan women's rights activist who talked frequently by phone with Amir said she too was afraid - afraid to leave her husband, afraid to stay, afraid of being shipped back to Afghanistan.

But it was the wiretaps that provided prosecutors with devastating evidence that the accused trio - in conversations they believed were private - were, just weeks after the deaths, cursing the dead girls as "filth" and "whores" who had shamed the family and deserved their fates, and that there appeared to be a family songbook from which all surviving members were expected to sing.

What do the accused three have to say?
They're obliged to say nothing, of course, or even to present a defence. The burden of proving the case be-yond a reasonable doubt always rests with prosecutors.

But lawyer Peter Kemp did both, put his client, the 59-year-old Sha-fia, on the stand and called one of the surviving children to testify in support.

Only when the trial resumes Jan. 9 will jurors learn if lawyers David Crowe and Patrick McCann are going to do the same thing.

But Yahya, who turned 42 last week, and Hamed, who is soon to be 21, are already on record through lengthy video statements to Kings-ton Police and, in Hamed's case, also in an audio recording to a dubious "private investigator" named Moosa Hadi, who was hired as a translator by the defence team but then went to work on the sly for Shafia.

Initially, Yahya stuck to the original narrative recited by all three: After a long day of driving, they had stopped for the night at a motel, though Hamed took the Lexus on to Montreal for a spot of business he had to do.

In this scenario, the last thing they saw of any of the four was when Zainab came into their room to ask for the car keys to get her luggage.

Then, the parents said, when they woke up that morning, the four were gone, the Nissan missing. Hamed came back to Kingston in the family minivan to help his parents make a missing persons report.

Yahya changed her tune after her arrest, admitting they had all been at the locks, and that she and Hamed heard a splash and knew the Nissan had gone into the water. But then, she said, she had swooned and gone unconscious, and knew nothing else. The next day, she recanted this new version.

Hamed, meantime, didn't tell the police he'd been in an odd accident - a collision in a near-empty parking lot with a barrier - that same morn in Montreal. When they learned about it, they confronted him and he admitted it.

But months later, in the fall of 2009, Hamed also admitted in his chat with the unofficial private eye that he had staged the accident to cover up the damage done to the Lexus at the locks.

The truth of that night, he said now, was that Zainab and the others were determined to go for a drive that night and, worried, he had followed them.

He accidentally got too close and hit the Nissan, he said, and while he was picking up the pieces of broken headlight, he heard a splash. He told the wannabe private eye he sounded the horn and dangled a rope in the water, but saw no signs of life. So, he said, off he went to Montreal, too afraid to call police to help his sisters because he feared they would blame him for allowing Zainab to drive without a licence.

That makes three versions on the table: the original story, wherein the family had no inkling of what happened; Yahya's recanted version, which places all three of them at the locks but fills in no blanks; or Hamed's most recent version, which puts the parents back at the motel while he, befuddled brother, is there for the terrible accident.http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Christie+Blatchford+Death+without+honour+Shafia+tr ial/5869938/story.html

Rockin Ma

December 16th, 2011, 09:43 PM

Whisper

December 16th, 2011, 09:51 PM

no when they booked at motel ,when asked how many 1 said 10 people and the other said 6 people
So they fucked up there

Whisper

December 17th, 2011, 08:45 PM

Conflicting testimonies

Justice Robert Maranger sent the Kingston Mills murder trial jury home for the holidays this week with a stern reminder: as they get together with friends and family, do not to discuss the details of the case.

That may come as a relief to the seven women and five men who, for nine weeks, have listened intently to the testimony of more than 50 witnesses, watched hours of videotaped evidence and viewed gruesome autopsy pictures.

The Crown wrapped up its case last week. Its theory: that the three accused murdered four of their family members — to preserve family honour — then pushed a car containing their bodies into the Rideau Canal.

In a bold move, defence lawyer Peter Kemp put his client, Mohammad Shafia, on the stand.

Shafia, his wife Tooba, and their son, Hamed, each face four counts of first-degree murder.

Shafia testified that he loved his daughters — Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 — as well as his first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad.

There would be no honour derived from killing them, he said.

Crown witnesses had told a story of regular physical and mental abuse in the Shafia home.

Those claims were made by the children themselves to police officers, social workers and teachers who all testified at the trial.

Then the testimony of a star defence witness this week threw all those assertions into doubt.

A sibling of the dead sisters testified that the stories of abuse were all made up — that he and Sahar and Geeti fabricated lies to get sympathy from those adults and they benefited by getting better grades in school than they deserved.

The young man described the home life as "joyful."

In his cross-examination, Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis asked the witness the question likely going through minds of the jurors.

"Where do you draw the line on manipulating people and telling lies?" Laarhuis asked him.

"When it goes too far, I guess," he replied.

Some of the established facts the jury have heard are:

n That the family of 10 left on a vacation from Montreal on June 23, 2009;

n After a one-day detour to a wilderness area north of Montreal, they detoured to Niagara Falls where they stayed until June 29;

n That evening, they headed back toward Montreal until they arrived at Kingston some time in the early hours of June 30;

n Just before 2 a.m., Hamed and Mohammad booked two rooms at the Kingston East Motel on Hwy. 15, a few kilometres from Kingston Mills;

n At 8:30 a.m., an employee at the Kingston Mills lock station discovered the family's black Nissan Sentra underwater — the four women's bodies were taken out later that day.

There the stories diverge.

The family claims that Zainab came to the motel room that night, asked for the Nissan keys and proceeded to take her sisters and Rona on a deadly night ride.

Police say the women never got to the motel. Hamed and Mohammad left Tooba and the four women at the locks that night while they went to get the motel room. Then the second family vehicle, a Lexus SUV, had to be employed to bump the Nissan and the victims into the water.

The girls' brother was questioned this week about what he recalls of that ride from Niagara Falls to the motel.

Where did they leave Tooba and the four women parked that night, Laarhuis asked.

The young man could only describe being at a "dark place."

"I woke up. Windows were rolled down and people were talking through the windows," he said.

Pressed by Laarhuis to remember more details, he replied, "I was asleep, sir. I don't recall."

Laarhuis moved on to the check-in at the Kingston East Motel.

It was precisely 1:53 a.m., the young man recalled, adding that the time was one of the few details he could recall from that night.

At the motel, he said, "I remember my dad giving me a key to open the door."

He said he went to sleep in the room almost immediately.

The only clear recollection he had — which he repeated several times during his testimony — was of Zainab coming into his room and asking for his cellphone.

"All I remember that night was Zainab. I don't remember anything else," he said.

Laarhuis asked about his sister asking for the Nissan keys.

"You didn't hear her come and ask for the keys, right?" Laarhuis questioned him.

"No," he replied.

Another established fact is that Hamed took the Lexus that night and drove alone to Montreal.

Just before 8 a.m., he called Montreal police to report an accident in a supermarket parking lot.

The family said Hamed had business to attend to in Montreal.

Police believe this was another part of the murder coverup: that Hamed was taking the Lexus home to hide the damage and staged the parking lot accident to establish an alibi.

The young man told Laarhuis that Hamed told him about the damage to the Lexus and that he didn't question him further.

Laarhuis was incredulous that the young man didn't try to find out more about Hamed's accident.

The young man said that, at the time, he didn't think it was related to his sisters' deaths.

Laarhuis accused the young man of being part of the family's murder coverup by withholding information from police and checking stories with Hamed and his mother before their arrests.

"You didn't want to help police find the truth, did you?" Laarhuis asked the young man.

"I told him everything I knew," he replied.

Another big question is why Rona, a 53-year-old mother figure in the family, would get into a car in the middle of the night with an unlicensed driver.

In fact, none of the women found dead in the car were licensed to drive.

The young man said she might do that if she thought Zainab would take her to buy a phone calling card.

Rona had been described by previous witnesses as being isolated within the family and suffering physical and emotional abuse at the hands of Mohammad and Tooba.

Her diary, found in the Shafia home during a police investigation, also talked about these abuses and her loneliness.

Confidantes testified she had to go to a park near the family home in Montreal to make calls.

The young man insisted, however, that she was a well-loved member of the family.

"You read her diary, yet you describe her as being blissfully happy in the house?" Laarhuis asked the young man.

"Yes, I do," he replied.

In her diary, Rona goes into a long description of how Mohammad bought Tooba great amounts of gold jewelry then deliberately showed it off in front of her.

She wrote: "When in Australia, (Tooba/Shafie kept taunting me by showing off the gold that Tooba had bought), but I resorted to patience, and consequently (Shafie) suffered huge losses in his business. God humiliated them and avenged me through other means. It is true that 'God is the succor of the helpless.' "

[...]
It read: "During the investigation of this matter, the police recovered gold and other jewelry that was the property of Rona Amir Mohammad, from the Nissan and from the autopsy. The total value of the gold content in the jewelry was $4,806.90 and the total appraised replacement insurance value of the jewelry was $23,730."http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3408220

HeatherHabilatory

December 18th, 2011, 01:32 AM

Does he think we're gonna believe teachers just GAVE these girls better grades because their parents were assfaces?

Whisper

December 21st, 2011, 08:57 PM

Just a little christmas recap from the paper tonight

Canada "honor killings" on trial
An Afghan immigrant allegedly murdered his three daughters because they wore short skirts and flirted with boys. "They betrayed everything," he said.

TORONTO, Canada — The alleged “honor killing” of three teenaged daughters by their Afghan-born parents has shocked a country that prizes multiculturalism and sparked debate about the integration of immigrants.
[..]
The family lived in Montreal but the trial is in the eastern Ontario city of Kingston, where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence River. The accused are alleged to have drowned the victims, whose bruised bodies were found piled inside a car at the bottom of the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009.
Prosecutors have referred to the deaths as so-called “honor killings” — the murder of women for perceived violations of sexual or behavioral norms imposed by tradition. The United Nations has estimated that 5,000 occur worldwide every year.
Having daughters that acted like normal Canadian teenagers made Shafia furious, the jury has heard. The girls — Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 — dressed in short skirts and flirted with boys.
Evidence presented includes cellphone pictures of the girls hugging boyfriends.
Shafia, a 59-year-old businessman, came to Canada with his second wife and their seven children in 2007. His first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, arrived months later, officially introduced to Canadian immigration officials as the children’s aunt. Polygamy is illegal in Canada.
In the months before their deaths, the three sisters told social workers, school officials and police they were verbally and physically abused at home. Zainab spoke of enduring long periods of forced isolation in her bedroom. She fled to a shelter for abused women two months before she died. Sahar attended school with scratched and bruised arms, and attempted suicide by swallowing pills.
Child-welfare workers and police visited the home but didn’t remove the children, the court heard, apparently because the sisters refused to repeat their complaints in front of their parents.
Five weeks before her murder, Zainab married her boyfriend in a Montreal mosque. The marriage was dissolved the next day after pressure from her parents.
The accused have pleaded not guilty. They say Zainab took her sisters and “aunt” for a joyride while the rest of the family slept in a motel on the way back to Montreal from a visit to Niagara Falls, and likely had an accident.
Police suspected murder almost immediately. Pieces of a headlight from Shafia’s Lexus were found at the crime scene, and damage to the front of his car matched damage to the back end of the car in which the women were found.
Autopsies concluded that all four drowned. But police suspect they may have been killed before the car ended up at the bottom of the canal. The bodies were found piled in a way that made it impossible to figure out who was driving.
None wore seatbelts, and despite the driver’s window being fully opened, police say the position of the bodies suggests no one tried to escape from the submerged car. It was found in less than 7 feet of water.
Whatever the final verdict, the evidence so far has been chilling. Shortly after the deaths, police placed a listening device in Shafia’s car.
“They committed treason from beginning to end,” Shafia told the other two accused during one conversation in the car. “They betrayed humankind, they betrayed Islam, they betrayed our religion and creed, they betrayed our tradition, they betrayed everything.”
In another wiretapped conversation, Shafia, speaking to his second wife, is in a rage: “Even if they come back to life a hundred times, if I have a cleaver in my hand, I will cut (them) in pieces. Not once but a hundred times, as they acted that cruel towards you and me. For the love of God, what had we done to them? What excess had we committed … that they undressed themselves in front of boys?”
At one point, he is heard referring to his eldest daughter, Zainab: “Is that what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore?”
Then this outburst: “May the devil shit on their graves.”
Taking the witness stand in his defense, Shafia blamed his outbursts on photos he found, after their deaths, of his daughters hugging boyfriends and wearing short skirts.
“You believe there’s no value in life without honor, don’t you?” prosecutor Laurie Lacelle asked him.
“My honor is important to me,” he replied. “But you can’t regain your honor with murder … I’m a strict Muslim, but I’m not a killer.”
Later, Lacelle put it to him bluntly: “You believe their actions brought about their rightful deaths, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Shafia replied.
For many following the trial, it was a shocking and incomprehensible moment — a father who believed his daughters deserved to die.
Expert witness Shahrzad Mojab, a University of Toronto professor, said male-dominated societies see honor killings as a way of “cleansing” the perceived disgrace a woman has brought on the family. Mojab argued it predates the major religions and has been found among Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians.
“Even a rumor can cause the killing of a young woman,” Mojab told the court.
The murder trial led dozens of Canadian Muslim organizations — on two separate occasions this month — to publicly denounce honor killings as horrific violations of Islam.
One report says 12 women were the victims of honor killings in Canada between 2002 and 2010. One widely publicized case in 2010 saw Muhammad Parvez plead guilty to strangling his 16-year-old daughter, Aqsa, because she refused to wear a hijab, would not dress in traditional Pakistani clothes, and hung out with non-Pakistani girls. Parvez’s 29-year-old son also pleaded guilty to murder.
Asked by his grief-stricken wife why he killed their daughter, Parvez said: “My community will say you have not been able to control your daughter. This is my insult. She is making me naked.”
Like the Parvez case, the Shafia trial has raised questions about Canada’s 40-year-old policy of multiculturalism. Some argue integration in Canadian values is taking a back seat to tolerance of cultural differences. They point to the social workers who visited Shafia’s home and accuse them of letting multicultural sensitivities blind them to abuse.
Recently, the ruling Conservative government revised Canada’s citizenship guide to say that the country’s “openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence.”
Indeed, many argue that the underlying issue is violence against women, which afflicts mainstream Canadian culture as much as any other.
In the province of Ontario alone, there were 230 “domestic homicide-related deaths” from 2002 to 2007 — 142 women, 23 children and 65 men. All but 13 of the men who died in those incidents committed suicide after killing their wives, girlfriends or children.
The Shafia trial resumes Jan. 9.http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/canada/111220/canada-honor-killings-trial

Whisper

December 21st, 2011, 09:01 PM

Some really good pics we havent seen before at this link
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/photos/1479/#igImgId_23686

Whisper

December 23rd, 2011, 09:06 PM

In family horror, some Canadians see culture clash

TORONTO (AP) - On a summer morning in 2009, in canal locks east of Toronto, police made a grisly discovery: In a submerged Nissan car were the bodies of three teenage sisters and a 52-year-old woman.
A joyride gone tragically wrong, claimed the father, Mohammad Shafia, 58, who reported the disappearance. An "honor killing," prosecutors allege. A murder trial is under way, heating up a national debate about how to better absorb immigrants into the Canadian cultural mainstream.
[...]
The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children. The second marriage produced seven children.
The months leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, the court has heard. Zainab, the oldest at 19, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend, and she fled to a shelter, terrified of her father, the court was told.
The jury heard testimony that Zainab's sisters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, were hounded and trailed by their brothers because the parents suspected them of dating boys; that Sahar repeatedly said her father would kill her if he found out she had a boyfriend; that she had bruises on her arms; that Mohammad, the first wife who was helping to raise the children, also was brutally treated.
Zainab ran away from home for a couple of weeks and her sisters contacted authorities, saying they wanted to be removed from the home because of violence and their father's strict parenting, the prosecution said.
Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle presented wire taps and cell phone records from the Shafia family in court. In one phone conversation, the father says his daughters "betrayed us immensely."
Fazil Javad, Shafia's brother-in-law, said Shafia tried to enlist him in a plan to drown Zainab.
"Even if they hoist me up to the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honor. There is nothing more valuable than our honor," Lacelle quoted Shafia as saying in an intercept transcript.
Taking the stand and speaking in his native Dari through an interpreter, Shafia portrayed himself as a loving father with his daughters' best interests at heart. He repeated his contention that the family were returning from a Niagara Falls holiday, were in two cars, and were overnighting at a motel when Zainab took one of the cars.
The daughters met an accidental but "rightful" death for their disobedience, he said.
"You believe there's no value in life without honor, don't you?" asked Lacelle in cross-examination.
My honor is important to me," Shafia replied. "But you can't regain your honor with murder, respected lady, you must know that.

"I'm a strict Muslim, but I'm not a killer."
Other relatives - two of the children and a brother-in-law of Shafia - testified in support of the joyride scenario and portrayed the family as loving and caring.
The trial then adjourned for the holidays and will resume on Jan. 9.
Canada takes in 250,000 immigrants a year, more per capita than anywhere save Australia, and in recent years a number of so-called honor killings have prompted debate about absorbing immigrants into the mainstream and dealing with culture clashes between immigrant parents and their children. Even before the trial, Rona Ambrose, the women's affairs minister, had said the federal government was considering making such killings a separate category in the criminal code.
Her office has not replied to recent questions about whether the change is going through, and the debate continues about the larger issues the Shafia case has raised about assimilating immigrants.
More than 80 Canadian Muslim organizations, imams and community leaders have signed a call for action against "the reality of domestic violence within our own communities, compounded by abhorrent and yet persistent pre-Islamic practices rooted in the misguided notion of restoring family honor."
On the other hand, statistically, nonimmigrant Canadians have a higher rate of murdering spouses and children, in some instances, also over family dishonor. Jeffrey Reitz, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in immigration issues, warns against using the term honor killings and equating it with any specific culture.
"If you label it an honor killing, the tendency is to say, 'Oh, what a terrible culture that is,' and the problem (of domestic violence) stems across cultural groups," he said.
The United Nations reports 5,000 females a year are victims of honor killings around the world. In Canada, social worker Aruna Papp says she has counted 15 cases since 2002, while psychiatrist Amin Muhammad, commissioned to write a report for the government about honor killings in Canada, predicts there will be more as immigrant communities grow, bringing in some newcomers with militant cultural beliefs.
"Immigrants who come here can't bring their own mindsets with them. They can't practice their own cultural ideologies if they go against the grain," he said.
The government must do more, and offer services that are more visible and accessible, especially to non-English-speakers, he said.
Tarek Fatah, the Pakistani-born founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, is a fierce opponent of Islamic militancy. He says it is shocking that honor killings are happening in Canada: "a slap in the face of our fundamental value of what it is to be a human being."
Papp, the social worker who wrote a report on honor killings for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a privately funded conservative think tank, worries that domestic violence rooted in family honor has spread to second-generation families. She argues for tougher background checks on would-be immigrants, as well as teaching immigrants Canadian rights and values.
Papp, who is of Indian descent, speaks from experience. "I came here when I was 21, with a third-grade education. I had children when I was young. I didn't know how to properly parent," she said. "I did and said things I didn't know at the time were wrong, things my parents did and said to me growing up that were acceptable within the Indian culture. It's a learning process. Parents, especially immigrant parents, need to be taught parenting skills and what's acceptable behavior here."http://www.winknews.com/National-World/2011-12-23/In-family-horror-some-Canadians-see-culture-clash

Whisper

December 31st, 2011, 09:46 PM

Plaque would honour women

Pending permission from Parks Canada, a memorial could be placed at the Kingston Mills locks where the bodies of three girls and a woman were found more than two years ago.

Dawn House, a shelter for homeless women and children in Kingston, is planning a campaign to raise money for a memorial tree and plaque.

"I think it is appropriate, regardless of the outcome of the trial," said Karen Preston, who put forward the initial idea for the memorial tree and plaque.

In late June 2009, the bodies of sisters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia and Rona Amir Mohammad were found in a car submerged in the water above the locks.

Three people are currently on trial for their murder.

"The memorial is not about whether this was a murder or not a murder," Preston said.

"It's about the fact that four women and girls died there."

Preston said she has talked with a representative of the Rideau Canal National Historic Site and was told other memorials have been set up along the canal in the past.

A decision about a memorial at Kingston Mills would be made in late January, she said. Donations to the memorial would be collected by Dawn House.
If the memorial cannot be put at Kingston Mills, it would be set up at Dawn House on Victoria Street, Preston said.

Contributions to the fund in excess of the amount the memorial costs would be donated to Dawn House, she said.

Supporting Dawn House would be fitting because one of the girls who died made use of a similar shelter in Montreal, Preston suggested.

"I think it is a great idea," said Violet Acevedo, executive director of Dawn House.

"We do deal with a lot of women who are not just dealing with abuse but are leaving home."

The fundraising effort likely will not start until the spring, and Acevedo said that among the details still needing to be worked out is whether the names of the women who died can be used in the campaign.

In addition to providing a lasting memorial to the women, the fundraising campaign would be a welcome addition to Dawn House, which has struggled financially for years.

The facility is funded primarily by the city, the Ontario ministry of community and social services and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Dawn House currently faces the possibility of losing a portion of its city funding. In May, as part of a review of its strategy for homelessness, the city determined Dawn House could lose some of its funding, in part, because of a lack of day programs.

[;;;]http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3421466

Whisper

December 31st, 2011, 09:49 PM

Kingston Mills murder trial tops news stories of year
http://www.thewhig.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3421467

Whisper

January 5th, 2012, 09:34 PM

Murder is off-limits in Islam
Evidence in the Shafia case has reinforced stereotypes about honour killing. It’s time for Muslims to speak out against violence

Kingston, Ont. – The Shafia family murder trial, which resumes here on Monday, has caused anger, disbelief and sadness in those following it – Canadian Muslims along with everyone else.
But among Muslims there is also a deep sense of frustration, especially over a conversation that was presented as evidence by the prosecution:
“They betrayed humankind; they betrayed Islam; they betrayed our religion and creed; they betrayed our tradition; they betrayed everything,” Mohammad Shafia is heard saying, allegedly referring to his dead daughters, in a conversation recorded by police.

Shafia, his wife, Tooba Yahya, and their eldest son, Hamed, have been charged with four counts each of first-degree murder. All three have pleaded not guilty.
The mere mention of Islam in this context – regardless of whether it was the motivation behind the tragic deaths of four members of the Shafia family – reinforces the stereotype that killing in the name of honour is an Islamic practice.

Killing a family member who is thought to have tarnished the family’s honour is in no way sanctioned or promoted by Islamic teachings.
For starters, murder is totally off-limits in Islam. Having an affair, a relationship or a boyfriend, not wearing the hijab, and so on – as dishonourable as these may be considered – are not cause for murder. Murder is prohibited to the severest degree and cannot be justified in any way, especially for girls who are under the care of their parents.

The Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him), who is regarded as a role model by Muslims, repeatedly emphasized kind treatment of women.
He is reported to have said: “The best of you is the one who is best to his women.”

After its advent in seventh-century Arabia, Islam put an end to the then-common practice of female infanticide. Just as they brought a barbaric practice to an end then, Muslims today have a responsibility to put a stop to the killing of girls in the name of honour – something unfortunately practised by some in predominantly Muslim societies as part of their ethnic or tribal culture.

That’s not to say that domestic violence is solely a Muslim problem. Domestic violence, and even killing in the name of honour, is a problem that cuts across geographic boundaries and ethnicities. Such killings have been committed by members of other faiths, even in Canada. The penal codes of countries including Argentina, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador allow for honour as a defence against a charge of murder, according to a 2002 United Nations report. Until 2009, “provocation” (including discovery of an adulterous spouse) was a legal defence in England. And a 2004 report for the European Union identified the Roma and female immigrants from Bulgaria, Romania and Poland as being at risk of being victims of “honour crimes” in Greece.

Homes and families are meant to be a source of love, peace and tranquillity.
No human being – woman, man or child – deserves to be subjected to domestic violence or live under the threat of violence or death. There are professionally trained individuals and organizations within the Muslim community available to offer assistance.

Individually, many imams and Muslim community leaders have been working to put an end to domestic violence. Realizing that their messages may not be getting through as well as they had hoped, more than 120 Canadian imams, community leaders and Muslim organizations recently signed on to a call to action against domestic violence.
As part of this initiative, imams across the country gave sermons on Dec. 9 condemning domestic and honour-based killings. The following day, the White Ribbon campaign, in which men undertook a pledge against domestic violence, was launched in Toronto’s Muslim community.
These are just a few of the many steps that must be taken in order to eradicate domestic violence and killings in the name of honour.

As Muslim leaders, as individuals and as Canadians, we have a responsibility to tackle this shared problem, because even one victim of domestic violence is one too many.
[;..]http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Murder+limits+Islam/5952962/story.html#ixzz1idbAFvAG

sheevaa

January 5th, 2012, 10:48 PM

Some really good pics we havent seen before at this link
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/photos/1479/#igImgId_23686

That one with Sahar and Rona just broke my heart. All of those girls and women were just beautiful. It's a damn shame their family couldn't appreciate the wonderful women that were a part of their family.

Whisper

January 8th, 2012, 09:13 PM

Shafia murder trial resumes Monday
http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/News/national/2012/01/07/19215126.html

Whisper

January 9th, 2012, 09:10 PM

Shafia mother breaks down as alleged ‘honour-killing’ trial resumes

KINGSTON, Ont. — A Montreal woman accused of killing three daughters and her husband’s first wife began to cry — just moments into her testimony — as she recounted her decision to give one of her children to the woman with whom she shared her husband’s affection.
“I told Rona, ‘Take your child,’ ” Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42, testified.
Yahya, her husband Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their son Hamed, 21, are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder.

[...]Yahya testified Monday morning that she was not aware that Mohammad had ever asked for a divorce. For most of her hour and a half on the witness stand, she spoke clearly and calmly, usually looking directly at her defence lawyer, David Crowe.
But she began to cry early in her testimony when she described her decision to give her third-born child, Sahar, to the infertile Mohammad to raise as her own.
Yahya also testified that the family’s seven children were never disciplined physically, save one occasion when Shafia struck several of the children because they had returned home in the evening after their curfew.
She said Shafia’s typical tactic for punishing bad behaviour was to swear at the children and make a big deal out of small issues. She testified that he would talk about an issue exhaustively, to the point of irritating the children.
Yahya testified that after Mohammad’s death, the family found her diary, a document presented in evidence by prosecutors. In the document, Mohammad alleges that she was isolated and abused in the family, particularly by Yahya, and lived a miserable life.

Yahya testified that she glanced through the diary but made no effort to hide or destroy it.
Her testimony continues Monday afternoon.
The jury has seen reams of evidence from the Crown, including five pieces of a broken headlight from Mr. Shafia’s Lexus, which the accused said were indeed from his car after he followed Zainab and the others to Kingston Mills (Mr. Shafia said in court testimony that the girls had insisted on the joyride and he was concerned Zainab was driving without a license).
The jury has also heard testimony from dozens of people, including family members, social workers, police and forensic pathologists. They also listened to wiretapped conversations secretly recorded by Kingston police — discussions in which Mr. Shafia is heard saying “May the Devil s— on their graves!” among other condemnations of the girls’ “shameful” behaviour. Zainab had a relationship with a boy she was trying to keep secret from her family, court, heard. In an email to her boyfriend, shown as evidence in court, Zainab said she hoped they would marry. She also warned him to keep their relationship secret from her brother.http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/01/09/shafia-mother-breaks-down-as-alleged-honour-killing-trial-resumes/

Whisper

January 9th, 2012, 09:13 PM

KINGSTON, Ont. — Tooba Mohammad Yahya lasted just 10 minutes on the witness stand before she was overcome by emotion that choked off her words.
The Montreal woman, who is accused — along with her husband and oldest son — of murdering three of her daughters and her husband's first wife, was the first witness Monday after a 25-day break in the sensational alleged honour-killing case.
"I told Rona, 'Take your child,'" Yahya, 42, testified Monday, as she explained her decision to give her third-born child, Sahar, to Rona Amir Mohammad, who was her husband's infertile first wife. Shafia married Yahya, without divorcing Mohammad, so that he could have children.
The practice is legal and accepted in the family's native Afghanistan. They moved to Canada in 2007 but concealed the polygamy.
[...]
An expert on the ancient practice of honour killing testified that in some cultures, it is believed that a family's tarnished reputation can be restored by murdering those who are disobedient, typically wives and daughters.
[...]
Yahya, whose testimony may last several days, was not asked Monday by her lawyer, David Crowe, about the deaths of the four family members. She testified that her children were never punished physically, save for one incident in which Shafia hit several of the children because they returned home in the evening after curfew. She said her husband's preferred method of punishing the children was to badger them.
"He used to talk a lot," she told jurors. "He was persistent on something. He used to talk about some mistake which the children did.
"He used to go on and continuously. He was just swearing at them and continuously talking about that for weeks."
She also said her daughters were not forbidden from wearing makeup and they were not ordered to wear traditional Islamic head coverings, though they were taught that they should wear them.
"The parents have to teach the religion to the children," Yahya testified, adding that she also explained to her children that Islam forbids a parent from forcing a practice on a child.
Yahya said her children were forbidden from having boyfriends and girlfriends.
"Me and Shafia and also Rona, we decided that (until) the time that the children graduated from school and they . . . show their diploma to us, they are not allowed to have girlfriend or boyfriend or to get married," she testified. Yahya said the children were told about the rule when the family lived in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
She said she had never seen her daughters wear head scarves, contrary to the testimony of several witnesses, including teachers, who testified that they saw some of the girls wearing head scarves to school.
Yahya testified that after Mohammad's death, the family found her diary, a document presented at the trial by prosecutors. In the document, Mohammad wrote that she was isolated and abused in the family, particularly by Yahya, and lived a miserable life. Mohammad claimed Yahya conspired to "separate" her from Shafia.
"I don't see anything like this, to separate her husband from her . . . and she never complained to me," Yahya testified.
She said she made no effort to hide or destroy the diary, which was later found by police when the family's home in St. Leonard, outside Montreal, was searched.
[...]
"I never say anything like this," Yahya testified. She said Sahar ate some powder from packaging material but she spit most of it out and was not seriously hurt. When Mohammad arrived to discover the incident, she began yelling at Yahya and accusing her of harming Sahar, Yahya testified.
Yahya said the incident began because Sahar was upset that her sister Zainab had taken a piece of her clothing. She said Sahar had developed a habit of dramatically stating she would "kill herself" whenever she couldn't get her way or whenever she was upset.
The trial heard previously from social workers, teachers and child protection workers in Montreal who feared that Sahar was suicidal and depressed, particularly in 2008.
[....]
http://www.canada.com/news/Shafia+wife+breaks+down+honour+killing+trial/5968277/story.html#ixzz1j0thLM4Y

VXIII

January 9th, 2012, 10:28 PM

The victims certainly didnt feel as though life was good at home, they lived in fear and uncertainty... I dont believe Toob...

Yahya testified the Shafia children did not fast for Islam's holy month of Ramadan. She said her husband didn't want them to because he was concerned it would "stunt their growth."

She said she taught the children about their religion, but did not force it on them. The defence showed a number of family photos and noted that most of the female members seen in them were not wearing the Islamic hijab head-covering.

Daughter acted out when 'she wanted expensive things'

The defence later questioned Yahya about another claim in the diary, where Rona Amir writes about a suicide attempt by Sahar after an argument. In the diary, Rona describes the girl swallowing the preservative that comes in purses and Yahya dismissing it, saying, "Let her kill herself."

Yahya presented a different version of what happened. She didn't deny that Sahar swallowed the preservative, but said she spit it up and refused medical attention. She said Sahar frequently said, "I'll kill myself" when she didn't get her way.

Yahya said one of Sahar's teachers offered her an explanation for the girl's behaviour. She told the court the teacher said, "Because you love her a lot, she is abusing this emotion whenever she wants expensive things."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/01/09/shafia-trial-resumes-kingston2.html

Whisper

January 10th, 2012, 02:57 PM

http://i44.tinypic.com/24c8h95.jpg
The dirty cunt is smiling/smirking omg Id love to be there fucking smacking that right off her face as I shoved her back onto a boat headed back to where she floated in from
Tooba Mohammad Yahya arrives at the Frontenac County Courthouse in Kingston, Ont., on Tuesday Jan. 10, 2012.

The Montreal woman accused in the killing of her three children and her husband's other wife testified Tuesday that she lied to police when she initially said was at the scene where their bodies were found.
Tooba Yahya said she made up the story of being at the Kingston Mills lock in Kingston, Ont. because she worried police would torture her son, the co-accused Hamed Shafia, 21.
Yahya testified that she thought that if she placed herself at the scene than her son wouldn't come to harm.
[...]
In the interrogation after her arrest, Yahya told police they were at the scene that night but after hearing a splash she fainted and didn't know what had occurred.

The Crown used that interrogation as a key piece of evidence in an attempt to refute the family's claims that they were not at the canal. Yahya later recanted her initial statement to police.

Crown prosecutors have alleged in court that the elder Shafia in particular was upset that the girls were dating boys and telling authorities they didn't feel safe at home. They say the girls were killed to restore family honour.

During his testimony, Shafia insisted that it was an "impossible" claim to suggest he would kill his own daughters.

In her first day of testimony Monday, Tooba Yahya broke down when discussing her relationship with Rona Mohammad, the first woman her husband, Mohammad Shafia, married in Afghanistan.

Mohammad couldn't have children so Shafia took a second wife. Yahya said that while she was pregnant with her third baby, she promised Mohammad the child would be raised as her own. http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120110/shafia-trial-tuesday-120110/20120110/?hub=MontrealHome

Whisper

January 11th, 2012, 08:09 PM

Shafia trial: accused says she lied to police to save her son

KINGSTON, Ont. — A Montreal woman accused, along with her husband and son, of murdering four people including three of her daughters, told jurors that she lied to police in her first interrogation in a bid to save her eldest son.
[...]
On the day the trio was arrested, Yahya told an officer she was at the canal early that morning when the Nissan plunged into the water. She said she did not see what happened — it was very dark — and she fainted from shock. The next day, she recanted the claim that she was at the canal when the car went into the water.
In her testimony Tuesday morning, Yahya said she feared that Hamed was going to be tortured by authorities so she fabricated the story that she had been at the canal.
"I would have done whatever I was able to do . . . and (thought), 'Please don't touch Hamed and he's innocent,'" Yahya testified.
She said she would have given up her life to save him. Yahya testified that she realized, as she sat in a police cell overnight, that "one lie" can cause a lot of problems, so she took it back.
Under questioning by Crown prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis, Yahya refused to concede that it was a lie when she was first interviewed by police and told them that Mohammad was her husband's cousin.
"I was not thinking about those small stuff," she said, in explaining why she didn't reveal that Mohammad was Shafia's first wife in the polygamous family. "It didn't cross my mind to bring that up."
"Well, it did cross your mind and what you decided to do was tell a lie," Laarhuis shot back.
"No, that wasn't the case . . . he wasn't an immigration lawyer," Yahya responded. She explained that the family had told immigration authorities Mohammad was a cousin so that she could get into the country and she didn't believe it was necessary to tell police investigating the deaths anything different.
"You did not want the police to know that Rona was Shafia's wife because that would be very suspicious because then it was his wife who was dead," Laarhuis suggested.
"Look, sir, our matter was bigger than what happened to Rona," Yahya replied.
Laarhuis grilled her about her testimony about a photo album of family snapshots that police found in the Shafia home in Montreal when they searched it on July 21, 2009.
Yahya said, in response to questions from her lawyer and from Peter Kemp, Shafia's lawyer, that the album was found in Sahar's bedroom sometime between July 5 and July 7. It contained photos of Sahar wearing revealing clothes, hugging her boyfriend and also snapshots of her in a bra and underwear. Shafia testified previously that he did not know Sahar had a boyfriend until he saw the photos.
Shafia, who had been sad and depressed since the deaths, became angry after seeing the photos, Yahya testified. She said the photos shocked him and led him to utter many of the foul curses that were heard on secret police recordings.
Shafia was heard on recordings introduced at the trial calling his daughters "whores" and saying: "May the devil shit on their graves."
Yahya said she removed many photos from the album and put them into a suitcase so that Shafia wouldn't keep looking at them.
aarhuis pointed out that when television reporters interviewed Yahya and Shafia on July 2, they were videotaped as they leafed through what appeared to be the same distinctive photo album.
"Would it surprise you to know though, that in those media interviews you're actually looking at the very album that's an exhibit here in this courtroom today?" Laarhuis asked.
"Sir, if I show my home to you, I have 10 of albums, which they're all the same," Yahya replied.
"The album, it's got princess right on the cover, it's pink, you're telling me you've got 10 albums in your house?" Laarhuis asked incredulously.
"Yes," Yahya replied.
Laarhuis wondered where the other 10 albums were when police searched the house.
Yahya suggested they were in closets or other places but she could not explain what happened to them.
Laarhuis asked if the family had multiple albums containing the same photos. Yahya answered yes.

"Oh, so you had identical albums," he said, as spectators in the courtroom snickered. "So you had many albums with the identical pictures in them?" yes," Yahya said.
"That must have been one hostile household then because Shafia would be seeing these pictures all the time, he would be ballistic all the time, 10 of them all over the place," Laarhuis said.
Yahya conceded, after continued questioning, that there were "maybe one or two" of the pink, princess albums in the house.
Laarhuis insisted that the album seen in the television interviews is the same album that Yahya claimed was not found until days later.
"These pictures, which they were naked and made Shafia upset, I found that later on and that album which we showed to the media, that might have been another album," Yahya testified.
Yahya is scheduled to return to the witness stand Wednesday. http://www.canada.com/news/Shafia+trial+accused+says+lied+police+save/5973961/story.html#ixzz1jCKIzllc

Whisper

January 11th, 2012, 09:03 PM

Shafia son stayed silent about how sisters died, says mother Tooba Yahya

KINGSTON—The first-born son, the good boy, the apple of his father’s eye, his mother’s rock — and their co-accused in multiple-murder, of course, bracketed by mom and dad in the defendant’s box.
But Hamed, mommy is displeased with you.
Tooba Yahya has admitted that now, from the witness stand, even while simultaneously doing all she can to protect the precious fruit of her fertile womb.
“Till now I’m upset with Hamed and my heart is bleeding. He should have told me how my children’s death was.’’
Two and a half years ago he could have revealed to a mourning mother what he allegedly knew about events that occurred in the early morning hours of June 30, 2009. If, indeed, as Tooba has maintained throughout, she had no personal knowledge how her three teenage daughters and the woman who was her co-wife in a polygamous Afghan marriage ended up floating lifelessly inside a Nissan Sentra submerged in the Kingston Mills Locks. If, contrary to what the prosecution asserts, she and her husband and Hamed were not at the canal that fateful night, hadn’t collectively plotted and carried out a mass “honour killing’’ of four troublesome females, didn’t use their Lexus SUV to push that Nissan into the water in a staged accident.

Because Hamed was in fact there when his sisters and “aunt’’ lost their lives, or so court heard earlier in this trial, from a witness to whom Hamed made the admission at Quinte Detention Centre, a conversation that was audio-recorded and played for the jury.

Not that the calamity had been Hamed’s fault, he’d insisted to Moosa Hadi, the interpreter-turned-amateur-sleuth who’d been hired by Hamed’s father, Mohammad Shafia, to help with their case.

He’d merely been standing by after tailing the Nissan to that location — Zainab at its wheel — while the rest of the family slept at a nearby motel and, whoops, rear-ended the vehicle with the Lexus while Zainab was attempting to turn around, saw the other car plunge into the locks as he was picking up bits of damaged headlights, dangled a rope over the stone wall edge to help any survivors escape and, when nobody emerged from the murky water’s 8-metre depth, hopped back in the Lexus and drove to Montreal, never even bothering to call 911.
That is Hamed’s story, though not yet heard as direct evidence, and in the Shafia family stories have a way of changing dramatically in the re-telling or depending on the audience.
Tooba, for one, has conceded that she is/was a liar. Like, when she told an RCMP investigator right after the threesome were arrested that she and Hamed and Shafia were at the canal when the Nissan inexplicably drove off the lip of the locks, though she didn’t actually see it happen, heard only the “splash’’ and promptly fainted. That version of events Tooba immediately recanted and has disavowed again since taking the stand in her own defence this week.

It was just a fabrication she invented on the spot, to deflect suspicion from Hamed so that he would be released from jail and not be subjected to “torture,” as she believed had been implied by another officer. How putting Hamed at the locks would have accomplished her mission of exculpation has not been logically explained.
On Wednesday, Tooba told Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis she learned of Hamed’s revelations to Moosa only last February, at the preliminary hearing. What a shock, that! All those months, close to two years actually, between arrest and preliminary and Hamed had not whispered a word of the “truth’’ to his suffering mother and father while all three languished in prison or during those first terrible weeks of keening and funeral-planning before they were taken into custody.

“He sees you grieving and crying, he doesn’t tell you anything about it,’’ wonders Laarhuis.

Tooba: “I don’t know why he didn’t say.’’

“At the funeral he doesn’t say anything.’’

Tooba: “No.’’

“When (youth protection authorities) took your (other) kids out of the house . . . .’’

Tooba: “No.’’

“When police searched the house…’’

Tooba: “No.’’

“When you were arrested…’’

Tooba: “No.’’

“When you were in jail for months…’’

Tooba: “No.’’

All that silence attributed, as Hamed told Moosa, to his fear of revealing the truth to his father, because he hadn’t stopped Zainab, who didn’t have a driver’s licence, from taking the Nissan for a joyride that ended in tragedy.

“Really, it’s frightening,’’ Tooba agreed of her son’s indefensible choice to stay mum. “When four people had died . . . .’’

Bad Hamed.

Laarhuis asked: “You’re defending Hamed now for not telling?’’

“No, I’m not. He should have told us everything clearly.’’

Clarity is in short supply at this trial and, for the past two days, in Tooba’s cross-examination evidence. Crown and witness have been like unstoppable force and immovable object. Eliciting a non-digressive response — a precise answer to a precise question, even just yes or no — has been a frustrating task for the prosecutor.

Tooba repeatedly seeks refuge in dim memory, unable to recall details about the night that the family set out from Niagara Falls in two cars, heading home to Montreal after a short vacation and stopped — unplanned, she says — in Kingston.

[...]
Tooba had changed positions with Shafia twice during the drive from the Falls, she testified, her husband vacating the Lexus and taking charge of the Nissan so that she could nap for a bit. But she was back in the driver’s seat as both cars approached Kingston, at which point she pulled to the side of the road while Shafia and Hamed went ahead to find accommodation, returning some 20 minutes later and then they proceeded to the Kingston East Motel.

She’s not sure where the aforementioned parting and rejoining of the vehicles occurred but she’s certain it wasn’t at the locks — a place where the family had stopped to rest only a few days earlier when the two-vehicle convoy was headed in the opposite direction, and where they’d visited twice the year before on another motoring holiday to the Falls.

Her familiarity with the locks is another detail Tooba failed to mention when police began their investigation. “They didn’t ask me.’’

[...]
“Why would you be surprised there was only one, not four?’’

Tooba: “Because there were four members of our family missing.’’

“You didn’t show any hope or optimism that, though one was dead, maybe the other three were alive,’’ Laarhuis persisted.

In the Crown’s view, Tooba would have been expecting four bodies to be retrieved, knew they were all dead, as did Shafia, as did Hamed, because they’d placed them there, had stage-managed the entire scene.

“I’m putting to you, the stop in Kingston was not a random stop, it was not an emergency stop,’’ said Laarhuis. “I’m putting to you that Kingston, and in particular the locks, was actually your destination that night.’’

Someone — the prosecution maintains it was Hamed — had typed a Google search into the family’s laptop a month earlier: “Where to commit a murder.’’

At the Kingston Mills Locks, says the Crown, they’d found it.http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1114013--tooba-yahya-can-t-remember-date-of-daughters-funeral-shafia-murder-trial-told?bn=1

Whisper

January 11th, 2012, 09:05 PM

Shafia upset over condoms in teen's room, wife testifies

The woman charged in connection with the death of four women, including her three daughters, said her husband became very angry after finding condoms in their teenaged daughter's bedroom, but that only happened after the girl's death.

Tooba Yahya continued to testify in her own defence in a Kingston, Ont. courtroom Wednesday. Yahya, her husband Mohammad Shafia, and their son Hamed are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder.
[...]

Yahya testified Tuesday that she had never heard of honour killings before police used the term in this case. "This is something which I never heard," she testified on Tuesday. "Honour killing, I heard that this time which they put that name to our case which is really shameful for us."
[...]
Yahya testified Tuesday that Shafia only found the album on July 5 or 6 when they cleaned the girl's bedroom, and became enraged. However, Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis showed video evidence in court that appeared to contradict the woman's testimony.
The video was taken before Yahya said Shafia found the album, and shows the couple leafing through the album, showing family pictures to reporters shortly after the women died.
Yahya said there may have been more than one copy of that particular photo album, which has a princess on the front cover, in their home. However, under questioning from Laarhuis she couldn't say exactly how many they had.
She said if they had more than one of the same album, it was likely because Sahar got copies of the photographs.
Laarhuis argued that if there were multiple albums around the home with the same pictures, Shafia "would be seeing these pictures all the time. He would be ballistic."
[...]http://edmonton.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120111/shafia-trial-wife-120111/20120111/?hub=EdmontonHome
I hate these fucking idiots more and more each day,so glad I dont live close to where trial is I would end up on FP

Whisper

January 12th, 2012, 02:37 PM

Shafia trial set to resume, courthouse power restored

http://i43.tinypic.com/24vn1c2.jpg
Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed Shafia arrive at the Frontenac County Courthouse in Kingston, Ontario, on Tuesday Jan. 10, 2011

KINGSTON, Ont. — A family murder trial is set to resume in Kingston, Ont., after a morning power outage delayed the proceedings.

A freezing rain storm apparently caused the power outage at the courthouse where the Shafia family murder trial is being held.

Now that power has been restored the trial is set to resume.

Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.
[..]http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120112/shafia-murder-trial-delayed-120112/20120112/?hub=TorontoNewHome
I dont think they should be allowed to see each other at all,that should be part of the proceedings

Shafia mother begins 4th day of testimony

The Montreal mother accused in the deaths of her three daughters and her husband's first wife returned to the witness box Thursday afternoon for another day of intense questioning by the prosecution in Kingston, Ont.
Tooba Yahya, 41, was set to begin testimony at 10 a.m. ET, but treacherous weather had delayed the start of the proceedings, as freezing rain knocked out the power to the Frontenac County courthouse. The accused weren't able to access the building because of the power outage, and instead were led past reporters and through the mezzanine using only emergency lighting.
The trial resumed just after 1 p.m.
On Wednesday, Yahya, during her third day of testimony and second under the prosecution, told the court she didn't feel dishonoured by pictures of her daughters wearing revealing clothing while with their boyfriends.
However, it was those photos, allegedly found after the girls' deaths, that sent her husband into a rage captured on a series of police wiretaps, Yahya said.
[..]
On Wednesday, Yahya faced questions about an account given to the court by a student who assisted the defence in preparation for the trial.
He earlier told the court that Hamed admitted he witnessed the accident, but didn't alert authorities because he was afraid of the wrath of his father. After dangling a rope in the canal and seeing no signs of life, he allegedly drove back to Montreal and told no one, according to the student's account.
'If it was an accident, he should have told us'
Yahya said if Hamed did indeed witness the deaths, he should have told his parents about the accident. She said the first time she heard that account was in court.
Yahya said he must have been frightened and under pressure.
"Are you defending Hamed now for not having told you?" Crown prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis asked.Tooba Yahya and her husband, Mohammad Shafia, arrive to the courthouse in Kingston, Ont., on Thursday.(CBC)
"No," Yahya replied.
"If it was an accident, he should have told us … I'm upset with Hamed and my heart is bleeding. He should have told me what my children's death was."
Yahya and Shafia, who have both testified in their own defence, maintained that the girls and Amir went into the locks after their eldest daughter took the keys from her mother in the early morning on June 30.
They both testified that they have no idea how the car ended up in the canal, but concluded it must have been an accident with their unlicensed and inexperienced daughter Zainab at the wheel.http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/01/12/shafia-trial-kingston-thursday.html

http://i41.tinypic.com/e66akw.jpg
Tooba Yahya and her husband, Mohammad Shafia, arrive to the courthouse in Kingston, Ont., on Thursday

Whisper

January 12th, 2012, 02:40 PM

Christie Blatchford: Shafia mother talking a lot, not saying anything

KINGSTON, Ont. — Cruel interrogators the world over may wish to pop by a courtroom here to get schooled in a brilliant new torture technique — put someone, anyone, in a room for a few hours with Tooba Mohammad Yahya and just see how long he lasts.

The garrulous accused murderess Wednesday completed her third day in the witness stand, where she remains as the long-suffering prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis continues to cross-examine her.

She is the human equivalent of the tap that can’t be turned off and yet, for all her words, she says little that is not qualified to within an inch of its life.
[..]
In the faint hope of just once eliciting a straight answer, Laarhuis has several times been reduced to outright begging.
Tooba,” he has said gently at such moments, “it’s a simple question.”
Tooba Mohammad Yahya says she and husband Mohammad Shafia led a liberal family.
. But for Yahya, a simple answer to a direct question — say, “Is today Wednesday?” — would go like this.
Sir,” she might say, “at this time, my condition is not good. My condition is very bad from the pressure. My brain is not working at this moment. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. Do you want me to tell a lie and say it is Wednesday, is that what you want? Sir, in our culture, lying is not good. It is forbidden by the Koran.”
Here, she might waggle a reprimanding finger at Laarhuis before winding up with a non-sequitur so magnificent, so far out of left field, it takes your breath away: “And sir, I am a mother. Imagine. I have lost three children and three living ones have been taken from me. It is very hard for me. You put me in jail for 2 1/2 years, how can I know? Is it Monday? Is it Wednesday? How can I know?”
For the record, she has said virtually all of these things, at various times and sometimes all at once, over the course of her evidence.

To add to Laarhuis’ difficulties is the fact that he is so frequently interrupted by objections from defence counsel.
Yahya’s actual lawyer is David Crowe, but on Wednesday, he objected to Laarhuis’ questions only five times; Patrick McCann, who represents Hamed, stood up to object almost twice as often as Crowe, and Peter Kemp, who represents Shafia, objected once as well.
Seventeen times Laarhuis was interrupted, a fact which didn’t go entirely unnoticed by Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger.
Once, when McCann rose to accuse to accuse the prosecutor of “trying to twist” Yahya’s earlier testimony, the judge said sharply, “No one’s trying to twist it. He’s trying to conduct a cross-examination.”
n another occasion, when McCann and Crowe were both on their feet, the judge muttered, “You know what, you’ve got to let the guy do his cross-examination.”
In fairness to them all, it is virtually impossible to know what exactly Yahya has said about anything because she changes her tune on a dime, has the memory of a hyperactive two-year-old, and is cut from the stubborn and unyielding cloth of Afghanistan, where for decades people have survived, in part, by telling foreigners what they think the foreigners most want to hear.
In one breath, she has testified (this in examination-in-chief with Crowe earlier this week) that in their household, no one had to wear the hijab and almost no one did. “I have never seen them (the girls wear it),” she said.
In virtually the next breath, she testified (this on Wednesday to Laarhuis) that the girls and women in the house did wear the Islamic head scarf during prayer (five times a day) and during the month of Ramadan, though of course never were they forced to do so.

It’s not an inconsequential detail — the parents’ alleged control of the girls is important, and the judge and jurors have a whack of evidence from school officials that Zainab, Sahar and Geeti all lived in fear — but it’s not as critical as some of the other areas where Yahya has contradicted herself.
That is, in essence, what she does. Despite all this, a glimmer of what may be the final defence position may have emerged.
Yahya appeared to accept the version of events which was belatedly offered to a self-appointed private eye named Moosa Hadi by Hamed months after the three had been arrested.
In this version, Hamed said he saw his sisters heading out in the Nissan that night, tried to stop them and then followed them to keep them safe.
Alas, he followed too closely, he told Hadi — the audio tape was played in court — and hit their car.
As he was out looking at the damage, the Nissan went into the water at the locks.
When Laarhuis asked his mother, Yahya, about this, she said, “My heart is bleeding. Hamed, he should have told me.”
amed’s reason for not telling anyone, or calling for help, or phoning police was that he was afraid.
As Yahya put it, “He said he had two reasons: he was frightened not to be in trouble, for sure, that was the death of four people.”
“But if the deaths were accidental?” Laarhuis asked, the suggestion that Hamed would have nothing to fear.
If it was an accident,” Hamed’s mommy dearest replied, “he should have told us everything clearly.”
f it was an accident? How deftly she raised, or embraced, the possibility that perhaps it wasn’t.
Mea culpa: It isn’t only Yahya’s brain that stops working. In Wednesday’s column I rendered Yogi Berra the “late, great” Yogi Berra. He is, praise Allah, still very much alive.http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/11/christie-blatchford-shafia-mother-talking-a-lot-not-saying-anything/

Whisper

January 12th, 2012, 08:48 PM

Shafia murder trial continues today
http://www.cjad.com/CJADLocalNews/entry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10334589

Whisper

January 13th, 2012, 08:48 PM

Shafia mom tells court 'we're not murderers'
WARNING: Story contains graphic content

The Montreal mother at the centre of the Shafia murder trial on Friday denied that she killed her daughters, telling the Kingston, Ont., court that her family are "not murderers."

Tooba Yahya made the comments in court after prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis laid out in detail how the Crown believes Yahya, along with her husband Mohammad Shafia and 21-year-old son Hamed Shafia, killed her three daughters and her husband's other wife.

[...]
"No sir, we are not murderers. We are a very sincere family.… If you were a mother, then you could have known what is a heart of a mother for a child. Don't ever tell me that I killed my children," Yahya said.
Laarhuis alleges the accused drove the victims directly to the locks. He said somebody left the car running, rolled down the window, put the gearshift in neutral and aimed the wheels of the car.
Laarhuis said that next someone reached through the open window and put the car into gear, thinking that on its own power, the vehicle would go into the water.
"What you did not expect, what was not part of the plan, was that the Nissan would get hung up. There was now an emergency, now you had bodies in the car hung up on the edge of the canal," Laarhuis said.
Laarhius said that Shafia or his son got behind the wheel of their Lexus and, as described by a collision expert, hit the Nissan into the canal, damaging both vehicles and causing the Nissan to spin as it sank.
But Yahya denied the account.
The prosecutor has made the suggestion that the three daughters and Amir were dead when their bodies were put in the car then pushed into the water. However, there's been no proof offered to the court of the theory.
A forensic expert who testified said the cause of death was drowning, but he couldn't say whether the four family members drowned in the canal locks or elsewhere.
[...]
Earlier Friday, Yahya was questioned by Laarhuis about her brother's claim that her husband told him he was planning to kill their 19-year-old daughter Zainab
Yahya said in court that she didn't know about her brother's claim regarding the threat until the funeral and that her husband and her brother had been "enemies"
"How could I have believed [him]?" she said. "How is it possible that I can accept someone who is [an] enemy of 20 years?"
She said if her brother was concerned about the safety of the children, he should have called police and told her about her husband's alleged plan.
Laarhuis asked Yahya if she felt there would have been a risk to her own safety if she called police and left with the children.
"I never expected that from Shafie," she said. "I never expected Shafie to be such a person to kill his children.… If a person knows their children are in danger, a person will do all the things to safeguard the life of their children."
Yahya was not suggesting that Shafia was involved in deaths, only that she never felt unsafe or that Shafia wasn't the type of person who would harm her or the children.
Yahya also testified on Friday that it's common for Afghan men who are angry at their daughters to call them "whores."
Yahya was questioned by Laarhuis about several incidents when her husband was angered by his children. Shafia is heard on wiretaps before their arrests calling the deceased girls treacherous and whores.
Yahya testified that the level of anger heard on those wiretaps was the same kind of anger Shfia expressed during incidents where he believed the girls misbehaved.
"Kids would hear these rants and uncontrollable rage and you're saying that didn't cause you any concern for the safety of your children?" Laarhuis asked.
"These are something that was recorded in our ears for many years. Most Afghan people are the same. When they are angry they are telling and swearing. It's not just Shafia but most Afghan men and women. They are the same," Yahya said.
Laarhuis asked Yahya if she was saying that Afghan men, when they're mad at their daughters, routinely call them whores.
"Sometimes when they get very angry — yes," Yahya said.
The bodies of the four women were found submerged inside the family's Nissan sedan in the Kingston Mills lock. The family, which moved to Canada in 2007, was allegedly en route home to Montreal after a visit to Niagara Falls. The Crown's case alleges a so-called honour killing in which the girls were killed because their behaviour and forbidden boyfriends brought shame to the family
Yahya said she has never heard of an honour killing and called the notion "stupid."
She has spent much of the week trying to explain some evidence presented by the prosecution, including an interrogation taped after her arrest in July 2009 in which she admits to being at the lock that night and fainting after hearing a splash.
In court, Yahya said that was a lie she concocted in response to evidence presented to her by police. She said she was under immense pressure from the interrogator and was under the impression, based on a conversation with another officer, that her son was being tortured.http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/01/13/shafia-trial-kingston-friday.html

Whisper

January 14th, 2012, 01:24 PM

Christie Blatchford: Afghanistan excuses don’t work for Shafia mother’s contradictions

KINGSTON — It was a classic of its kind, a real Tooba-ism.
Prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis was putting to said Tooba Mohammad Yahya some of what she had told police in earlier videotaped statements.
This is an absolute staple of cross-examination, its purpose to establish the witness is contradicting herself. Such contradictions are called inconsistencies, or what outside court are sometimes called lies.
Mr. Laarhuis already had established that after her arrest, in a long and winding interview with RCMP Inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh, who was brought in as a Farsi-speaking expert by Kingston Police, Ms. Yahya at one point said that on the critical night when half her family was wiped out, she had fallen asleep in the family Lexus and had never driven again that night.
Now, in her imitable fashion, Ms. Yahya was denying it.
“Were you in the Lexus?” Mr. Laarhuis asked.
o, not,” she replied.
“So,” Mr. Laarhuis said in a brilliant bit, “when you said you fell asleep in the Lexus and didn’t drive anymore, what you meant was that you didn’t fall asleep and you drove the Nissan?”
You see? All that is clear from Ms. Yahya’s ongoing stint in the witness box – four days and counting, most of it in cross – is that while she may be just an accused murderess, she is a proven dissembler and artful dodger whose relationship with the truth is akin to mine with chocolate: I recognize it always, but ration its use and avoid it whenever possible.
Shafia mother tells trial she lied to police over fears son Hamed would be tortured
[...]
Indeed, Ms. Yahya’s plea may be the sole constant element in the thousands upon thousands of words, all duly recorded, she has uttered since the day the black Nissan with four bodies in it was found submerged in the Kingston Mills locks not far out of town.

With virtually everything else, Ms. Yahya has said one thing, then another, then the opposite, and, if and when she is finally caught up in her own web, reverted to one of three possible explanations: A) She doesn’t remember (this is where she mentions all the stress and pressure she was under, and invokes her status as grieving mother); B) She says she lied, on purpose, to get out from under police pressure, or C) She simply offers up, with such gravity and satisfaction you’d think she was quoting Plato, one of her nonsensical head-scratchers (my favourite, several times repeated, is, “Sir, God is up, my children are down.”)
What has emerged, most clearly from her evidence though it was there in Mr. Shafia’s too, is a thread of pathology, and how this family hides behind the purported practices both of their native Afghanistan and of their religion, Islam.

This, remember, is a family which fled Afghanistan in 1992, and, being wealthy, to live in comfort in Pakistan, Dubai and Australia before immigrating to Canada in 2007. This is a family who had lived in Montreal for two years, but who didn’t know where the local mosque was and who had to ask relatives to hustle up a rent-a-cleric when Zainab was briefly wed (and then the marriage annulled).

Yet, how many times Ms. Yahya has lectured Mr. Laarhuis, and Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and the jurors, about the presumed superiority of Afghan culture, and used it to explain her family’s conduct. How many times has she has explained inconsistencies in her evidence by saying, “Well, in the Farsi language, when we say ‘fall asleep,’ we mean to lie down,” or, “When we say ‘vomiting,’ we say that when we throw something out from the stomach,” as though the word means something else in French or English..
The most grating example of this, of course, is her claim that when Mr. Shafia, caught on a police wiretap, famously cursed his dead daughters as whores and said, “May the devil s— on their graves!”, he was merely indulging his bad temper by using a common Afghan expression.
It may be common, but bets are it is not in wide use among parents whose children have just died.
Ms. Yahya had the misfortune of being born into a misogynistic, male-dominated culture in a war-and-strife-torn country, where people are necessarily hard.
But she hasn’t lived there for two decades. She herself is pretty darned Westernized. She has a licence and drives; from the family photographs the jurors have seen, she doesn’t wear the hijab very often. And she is one tough nut to crack.
Perhaps the most telling thing she has uttered came Thursday, when Mr. Laarhuis was asking why, when Mr. Shafia had cursed his daughters as filth, she didn’t speak up on their behalf.
You should ask him,” she said furiously. “He’s a separate person, why don’t you ask him.”
separate person, as she must be then too, not just a husband’s chattel.
How nice to know that.http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/12/christie-blatchford-afghanistan-excuses-dont-work-for-shafia-mothers-contradictions/

http://i41.tinypic.com/nla45c.jpg

Tooba Mohammad Yahya (L) and Mohammad Shafia at their 1988 wedding ceremony. Mohammad's first wife Rona is on the right..

Whisper

January 14th, 2012, 01:26 PM

Neither one looks thrilled to be married to the weasil
And notice in a culture of purity and virtue( or so they like to claim) shes not only not wearing white for her wedding day shes wearing a fucking rainbow

spinst

January 14th, 2012, 03:40 PM

Whisper

January 14th, 2012, 03:43 PM

Probably because that isn't a tradition for their culture...

shes still a skank lol

Whisper

January 14th, 2012, 09:09 PM

Shafia trial: Chilling details of Crown’s case rivet court
Yahya denies seeing husband and son ‘pressing’ victims into canal’s water
http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Shafia+trial+Chilling+details+Crown+case+rivet+cou rt/5994547/story.html

http://i43.tinypic.com/2pyqbg8.jpg
Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba, 41, and their son, Hamed, 20, are accused of murder. Tooba (green dress) and Shafia and Rona sitting down at the wedding ceremony in 1988

http://i40.tinypic.com/fnqpg8.jpg
Tooba and Mohammad Shafia (centre) are shown at their wedding in Kabul in 1988. On Shafia’s other arm is Rona Mohammad, Shafia’s other wife. The man on Tooba’s right is her brother, Homayon Jawad. The evidence photo was released by the court.

Well they did put the skank in white,I feel so bad for Rona,
wish I had known her I wouldve done what I couldve to get her out of that "marraige"
but women raised in that culture sometimes seem to accept the mans the god of the house
Men like that wouldnt last a day in my house,ask my husband

Whisper

January 15th, 2012, 04:45 PM

Tooba, for one, has conceded that she is/was a liar. Like, when she told an RCMP investigator right after the threesome were arrested that she and Hamed and Shafia were at the canal when the Nissan inexplicably drove off the lip of the locks, though she didn’t actually see it happen, heard only the “splash’’ and promptly fainted. That version of events Tooba immediately recanted and has disavowed again since taking the stand in her own defence this week.

I firmly believe they were drowned there 1 by 1 and placed into the car
That spot was scouted to make sure there were no cameras and nobody close enough to see or hear screaming of what was about to happen
I wanna see these 3 POS water boarded over and over again revived only to die again

sheevaa

January 15th, 2012, 06:31 PM

I was thinking that Toobitch would be the one that would break. She lies and covers like a damn politician in the middle of a scandal. One of them...one of them is bound to break, sooner or later.
I sincerely hope that they aren't able to bullshit their way to a lighter sentence. Seems Casey Anthony was able to do it just by lying her face off and never giving an inch, no matter how many lies she was caught in. I don't want the same thing to happen here. This is four different people, it's not right or just that their murderers get away with a damn thing!

Whisper

January 16th, 2012, 03:16 PM

noon update

http://i41.tinypic.com/sg25nm.jpg
Tooba Yahya enters the Frontenac County Court House in Kingston, Ont., on Monday

A mother charged with killing three of her daughters and the first wife in her polygamous marriage accused prosecutors of making up stories and criticized authorities for jailing a "respectable family," during her sixth day in the witness box.

Tooba Yahya, 41, is facing another day of grilling by prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis about the circumstances surrounding the early morning on June 30, 2009, when Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Amir, 52, were found dead in a car submerged in the Kingston Mills lock.
[..]
During testimony in a Kingston, Ont., court late Monday morning, Yahya said she had been "wrongfully charged" and described the arrest of the three accused as unjustified.
"This was a respectable family that was grieving and they put them under arrest," she said. "Under this suspicion you brought a respected family and put them into jail for two years. You took the freedom and the family's freedom and put us in [jail]."
Yahya also compared the Crown's theories about what happened that night to bedtime stories.
"This is a court date," she said. "People want to know the truth, not to make up stories from your mind."
Victims wanted to leave
Prosecutors noted that all four victims had expressed a desire to leave the family's home, but Yahya denied this was true.
[...]
She maintained that the last time she saw the victims was at the hotel where the family stopped for the night during their return to Montreal from a family vacation in Niagara Falls, Ont.
On Friday, Laarhuis laid out the prosecution's theory about what happened that night.
He said the women never made it to that hotel. He alleged that Yahya drove them right to the lock and met up with Shafia and Hamed after they dropped off the other children.
Victims' car rammed into canal, Crown says
Laarhuis alleged that the women, who were either sleeping or already dead, were in the Nissan when someone positioned it in front of the lock, rolled down the window, got out and put it into drive.
When the car got hung up on its way into the water, he alleged, someone got behind the wheel of the family's Lexus and pushed the Nissan into the lock.
Yahya denied this version of events, saying she would have done anything for her daughters.
She said she had gone right to sleep at the hotel after her daughter Zainab came in and asked for the keys and didn't know the women were missing until the next day.
The family waited until noon to report them missing, she said, because they thought they would return, and the parents didn't speak English or know the area.http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/01/16/shafia-trial.html

Laarhuis alleged that the women, who were either sleeping or already dead, were in the Nissan when someone positioned it in front of the lock, rolled down the window, got out and put it into drive.

This is the only part of the story that spooks me is they cant say if they were already dead or how they died

Whisper

January 16th, 2012, 07:54 PM

Todays updates

Shafia trial defendant claims prosecutors made up murder allegations

KINGSTON, Ont. – Tooba Mohammad Yahya completed four days of gruelling questioning by a crown prosecutor with the defiant suggestion that the accusations of murder against her and two family members are “stories” made up by the prosecution.
“This is a court date. It’s a date when people want to know the truth, not stories made up from your mind,” Yahya testified Monday, tapping her right temple with her finger.
[...]
Prosecutors allege that the victims died in an honour killing, orchestrated by Mohammad Shafia because he believed his daughters had shamed him by consorting with boys, dressing provocatively and disobeying him. His first wife had asked for a divorce, jurors have been told.
[...]
Laarhuis returned, in his final hours of questioning, to a theme he had raised earlier, that Yahya had often given a police interrogator answers that seemed to exonerate her and her son while pointing the finger of blame at her husband.
“No, no, dear sir. This is your thought,” Yahya testified. “This was a respectful family, three people who were grieving. They (police) put them under arrest and at that time when he put me six, seven hours under interrogation.”
Yahya repeated her claim that the pressure of the interrogation forced her to fabricate stories based on what the questioner had said. Prosecutors claim many of those statements that she now disavows were based on what truly happened.
[....]
Laarhuis asked Yahya why she was selected to masquerade in Canada as Shafia’s only wife in the polygamous family.
She said the family did what a lawyer suggested they do to get into the country. Laarhuis noted that Rona Mohammad did not appear to have a wedding ring
“That’s not up to me if I had a ring and Rona didn’t have a ring,” Yahya testified.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Shafia+trial+defendant+claims+prosecutors+made+mur der+allegations/6003428/story.html#ixzz1jfVLSyg1

Stupid fucking skanky bitch,
I hope to daddy that this trial is breaking their bank accounts (her and the other 2 shit heads)

Tundratot

January 17th, 2012, 01:24 AM

The prosecution should have objected to this witness and they should just stop questioning her. Six days of this hypocritical waffling and hot air and no end in sight. . . . SHUT UP, ALREADY!

Whisper

January 17th, 2012, 03:23 PM

‘He is not a murderer,’ Shafia relative tells Kingston trial
Three Afghan-Canadian immigrants accused of drowning four relatives in a so-called “honour killing” should be set free, and the people responsible for the investigation arrested and charged, the defendants’ murder trial was told Tuesday.

The suggestion came from defence witness Dr. Mohammad Anwar Yaqubi, the younger half-brother of businessman Mohammad Shafia. A physician who now lives in the Netherlands, Dr. Yaqubi was the second-last witness to be called in the trial, now in its third month.
At issue were remarks overheard on police wiretaps and entered as evidence in which Mr. Shafia cursed his three dead daughters as “whores,” “filthy,” and “shameless,” and used many other epithets.
His brother has been misunderstood, Dr. Yaqubi told the court.
[...]
Dr. Yaqubi, however, told the trial that although his contact with the Shafia family had for many years been very limited, he spoke several times with Mr. Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, one of the four people the defendants are accused of killing, and that she never mentioned any domestic troubles.
And as for the language Mr. Shafia used about the dead women, which included the remark, “May the Devil shit on their graves,” it resulted from grief and stress, Dr. Yaqubi said, telling the court he had listened to all the wiretapped conversations, recorded in the run-up to the arrests.
Those are statements that would exonerate my brother,” he said. “If you analyze them properly you will see that dear Shafi (Mr. Shafia) should not be here. I think they should be released and the people in charge of the investigation should be charged.”
he wiretaps had been selectively “censored,” he claimed, because “I know this is not the place for my brother to be because he is not a murderer. There is no sin greater than murder – or to accuse somebody of it.”
He also echoed his sister, who testified Tuesday, in stating that he had never heard of the concept of honour killings, either in Afghanistan or in the Netherlands.
Prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis then asked him if it would be offensive in Afghanistan for fathers to use such language about their daughters, just days after they died.
That would depend, he replied, because his homeland is a complex place. “Different families do different things.”
[...]
The accused say the Nissan ended up under water after Zainab and the other three borrowed it for a late-night spin, as the family stayed at a Kingston motel en route home to Montreal from a brief holiday in Niagara Falls.
[...]
Dr. Yaqubi also emphasized his view that Ms. Mohammad, Mr. Shafia’s dead first wife, seemed to be an equal partner within the polygamous marriage, although he agreed her sister in France, with whom she stayed before relocating in Quebec, had urged her to get a divorce and a financial settlement.
Central to the prosecution’s case is the thesis that Ms. Mohammad was in no way an equal, but rather was routinely mistreated, ostracized and treated as a servant. Her uncertain status as Mr. Shafia’s first wife, moreover, (her husband told immigration authorities she was a cousin) posed a threat to the family’s residency in Canada.

But as with much else that forms the basis of the prosecution case – police visits to the family’s Montreal home, unhappy behaviour by the children that included a suicide attempt, repeated absenteeism from school – Dr. Yaqubi agreed he had little first-hand information.“You really had no idea about the problems going on in your brother’s family did you?” Mr. Laarhuis asked him.
The witness gave a long, rambling reply.
Lunch Breakhttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/he-is-not-a-murderer-shafia-relative-tells-kingston-trial/article2305328/

biteme

January 17th, 2012, 03:57 PM

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/he-is-not-a-murderer-shafia-relative-tells-kingston-trial/article2305328/

Seems Dr. Yaqubi is a very competent lier, my favorite lie was his statment about honor killing

Testified Tuesday, in stating that he had never heard of the concept of honour killings, either in Afghanistan or in the Netherlands.

Whisper

January 17th, 2012, 03:59 PM

Yeah and I think one of my favorite lies by Tooooooooobitch is the one where she says she has never heard of honor killings before or what they were!~!

Abroad

January 17th, 2012, 04:14 PM

Dr. Yaqubi, however, told the trial that although his contact with the Shafia family had for many years been very limited, he spoke several times with Mr. Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, one of the four people the defendants are accused of killing, and that she never mentioned any domestic troubles.

Because she was really likely to confide in her husband's half-brother who she didn't have much contact with anyway, if she had had domestic troubles :eyeroll:

As for him not being familiar with the concept of honour killings......... :rant:

sheevaa

January 17th, 2012, 08:30 PM

Gonna get a T-shirt made "Shut Up, Toobitch!"

Or maybe Tell the Truth...but realistically, neither will likely happen

Whisper

January 17th, 2012, 08:48 PM

http://i42.tinypic.com/jf822q.jpg
Tooba Yahya and Mohammad Shafia leave the Frontenac county courthouse.
Shafia’s weapon ‘was his tongue,’ brother testifies at Kingston Mills murder trial

KINGSTON, ONT.—First the jury learned that Mohammed Shafia, when angry, often said he’d “cut someone in pieces” with a cleaver, but that such comments were innocuous.
Now they know where the expression comes from.

Dr. Mohammad Anwar Yaqubi, under cross-examination by the Crown in Shafia’s first-degree murder trial, said the accused, when he was just six years old, worked at a kebab shop in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The butcher would often be cutting meat with a cleaver to make the kebabs, Yaqubi recounted on Tuesday. And he’d say to young Shafia, “If you don’t do your job properly I’ll cut you with a cleaver!”
Shafia probably got it from that experience, Yaqubi said.
The inference? Mohammad Shafia’s invective against his dead daughter, Sahar, caught by police on wiretap, in which he vows, if she came back to life, he would use a cleaver to “cut (her) in pieces” is no big deal. He says that kind of thing all the time.
[...]
Among the most sensational elements of the trial is the language Shafia used to describe his daughters in the weeks after the deaths, all caught on tape. He compared them to prostitutes. He called them “treacherous,” “whores.”
fter seeing provocative pictures of Sahar, he seethed: “Even if they come back to life a hundred times, if I have a cleaver in my hand, I will cut (her) in pieces.”
[...]
But the language Shafia used was not foreign to the ears of his brother, Yaqubi, a surgeon who lives in the Netherlands, who became strident in defending his brother.
Yaqubi on Monday told Justice Robert Maranger and the jury that Shafia’s “weapon was his tongue.” For instance, “If someone didn’t pay him on time, (it was), ‘I will cut him with a cleaver.’” But he made clear Shafia wouldn’t actually carry out such an act.
On Tuesday, he went further. He didn’t agree with the Crown’s assertion that Shafia’s use of the word “whore” to refer to two of his daughters was inappropriate. He said it depended on Shafia’s “condition” at the time, his current state-of-mind.
Raising his voice, he said officers didn’t analyze the wiretaps properly and have misinterpreted the language used. “These people who were in charge of the interrogation or investigation, they didn’t do their job properly,” Yaqubi said. “They should be put in jail!”
Yaqubi impressed upon the prosecutor the differences between Afghan and Canadian cultures. In the former, he explained, parents might use “terrible words” to keep children in line, “because they have to learn their ‘limits.’”
He agreed that “honour” was important to Shafia, but was careful to note that the concept is subjective. A daughter taking a boyfriend doesn’t necessarily bring shame upon a family.
That said, depending on the context and the way in which the topic is broached, a father might strike a daughter who is asking to marry a boy. He concocted an elaborate scenario: For instance, if daughter showed father the picture of a boy whom she met at the casino, and the father was very tired and had lost money in his business.
[...]
On Monday, Shafia’s half-sister Farida Neyebkheil said only good things about him.
Prosecutor Laurie Lacelle showed her the infamous pictures of Sahar. “Would it surprise you your brother described Sahar as a whore” because of the photos?
“Yes, I’m surprised,” Neyebkheil said.
“That he called Zainab a whore?”
“Yes.”“You don’t know your brother that well,” Lacelle ventured.
Crown Prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis brought up the words Shafia used while ending the days-long cross examination of Yahya. He remarked how she never defended her daughters, not once.
Laarhuis had been pointing out several discrepancies in what Yahya told investigators. She has suggested she lied to police when she initially told them the family was indeed at the canal that night.
Why was she alarmed, rather than relieved, when police said there were cameras at the locks, because a camera would show what happened to their loved ones, right? That’s because they had indeed visited the locks in the past, including in 2008, but neglected to mention it to police, Yahya explained.
Laarhuis hypothesized other pieces of the puzzle.
The car’s ignition was in the “off” position when found because when it got caught up on the edge and had to be pushed in, the engine and lights were on, and the wheels were spinning, all attracting attention. Someone reached in and turned the ignition off.
And there were no electric lights at the locks. In the pitch darkness, how did they see? In fact, the light came from the Lexus, Laarhuis said.
And when Yahya initially told police she heard a splash at the canal, and then fainted, she shouldn’t have been surprised by a splash because there was water all around them. In fact it was because she knew what the splash meant.
And why would the family stop in Kingston on their way back to Montreal from Niagara Falls, where they were vacationing? Yahya also told police that she heard Shafia and Hamed had business to take care of.
“Had there been urgent business required of Hamed or Shafia in Montreal, they wouldn’t have stopped in Kingston at all,” Laarhuis said.
Yahya, at one point fed up with Laarhuis’s suppositions, laid into him.
“This is what you made up in your brain,” she said, comparing his theories to fairy tales, “like what a mother makes up to help make her child sleep.
But people want to know the truth… not to make up stories.”http://www.thestar.com/article/1116961--shafia-s-weapon-was-his-tongue-brother-testifies-at-kingston-mills-murder-trial