And in this case it has been.
When I lived in Ottawa, the apartment building I lived in was purchased by a pack of muslim doctors from Iran as an investment. One day I was informed that I would have to move because their muslim religion didn’t permit them to rent to “people like me.” What fucking nerve. And in my own country no less. I have a very long memory for this kind of religiously motivated bullshit and there’s been a lot of it.
Trackback URL for the following article [CBC]
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A Montreal couple and their son were all convicted Sunday of first-degree murder in the deaths of four family members.
Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed had pleaded not guilty.
They were accused of killing Hamed’s three sisters and their father’s childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.
The bodies of Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Mohammad Amir, 50, were found dead in the family’s Nissan, submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009.
When the judge asked if they each wanted to say anything, they one by one declared their innocence.
‘This is not just,’ Shafia says
“We are not criminal, we are not murderers, we didn’t commit the murder and this is unjust,” Mohammad Shafia said through a translator.
“Your honourable justice, this is not just. I am not a murderer, and I am a mother, a mother,” Tooba.
Hamed said in English: “Sir, I did not drown my sisters anywhere.”
Outside the court house, the chief prosecutor said, “This is a good day for Canadian justice,” adding that the four were “murdered by their family in the most troubling of circumstances,” Laarhuis said.
“This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and core principles in a free, democratic society that all Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy,” he said.
The verdict came after about 15 hours of deliberations, less than 48 hours after they were first charged by the judge in the case, Justice Robert Maranger.
They were each handed an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
‘Twisted notion of honour’
Maranger said it is difficult to imagine a more “heinous crime” than two parents convicted of killing three of their own daughters for “an apparent notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”
“The apparent reason behind these cold shameful murders was that four (victims) offended your twisted notion of honour,” the judge said.
Each of the Shafia family members addressed the court, denying their involvement. Hamed said in English, “I did not drown my sisters anywhere, while Yahya said “I am not a murderer.” Her husband echoed that, with “I did not commit any murder.”
One of the female jurors started crying after the verdict was read, wiping her eyes. Hamed grabbed a hold of the prisoners’ box for support, his parents rubbing his back as each juror affirmed that guilt was their verdict.
To return that verdict of first-degree murder, the jury had to be satisfied with six elements beyond a reasonable doubt including, that the accused caused the death of the victims, the accused caused the deaths unlawfully, the accused had the state of mind required for to commit murder and that the murders were planned and deliberate.
Three-month trial
During the nearly three-month-long trial, the Crown maintained the family road trip was part of a plot to kill the four because they had tainted the family’s honour. The Crown alleged the family’s patriarch was upset that his two eldest daughters wanted boyfriends, betraying his traditional Afghan values.
The Shafias moved to Canada in 2007. They fled their native Afghanistan more than 15 years earlier and had lived in Dubai and Australia before moving the family to Montreal and applied for citizenship.
At the time of the deaths, they were all permanent residents, except for Amir Amir who had only a visitors’ visa.
They told authorities, and initially maintained after the deaths, that Amir was Shafia’s cousin.
Shafia, by all accounts a prosperous business man, owned commercial property in the Montreal area and ran a business buying used cars in North America and shipping them overseas.
1st wife in arranged marriage could not conceive
Rona Amir was Shafia’s first wife. The couple wed in an arranged marriage in Kabul before civil war broke out in their homeland. Amir wasn’t able to conceive and encouraged Shafia to take another wife, which he did in 1989, marrying Tooba Yahya in another arranged marriage.
Yahya and Shafia had seven children, which Rona helped to raise. Court heard Yahya gave daughter Sahar to her co-wife to raise as her own.
However, the family situation deteriorated for Amir over time. Her diary details her trials and tribulations in the family and states she was like a servant to the preferred wife, Yahya, in the year before her death. She describes a lonely life in Canada and that she would “wander in parks and cry.” Court also heard testimony about her unsuccessful request for a divorce. According to the diary, Yahya likened her to a dead weight.
Zainab and Sahar, the two eldest daughters, also had trouble assimilating into life in Montreal within strict the boundaries of household rules, which included a prohibition on relationships with boys. Both had secret boyfriends, wore fashionable clothes and, according to evidence heard in court, resisted pressure from their parents and eldest brother to wear the hijab.
They both reported incidents or threats of violence from their father and brother to authorities.
Geeti was, as the Crown described, a rebel. While there’s no evidence to show she was hiding any boyfriends, she also resisted her family’s rules and had been caught shoplifting and expelled from class for wearing a shirt deemed too revealing.
According to the Crown’s case, the murder plot was sparked when Zainab ran away to a Montreal women’s shelter in April 2009. This, the Crown alleged, was the ultimate act of betrayal. She had made the family’s problems public and she did it so she could ultimately marry an unapproved man, the boyfriend she had hidden from her parents and brother.
She was eventually coaxed back home by Yahya with the promise that the wedding could go forward.
Court heard evidence that Shafia had called a relative of Yahya’s and proposed a plot to take Zainab to Sweden, have a picnic by the water and then drown her. Another relative testified Shafia had told him he would have killed his daughter if he had been at the marriage to her boyfriend, which was annulled the next day.
The defence tried to discredit these witnesses, pointing out long-standing animosity between Shafia and Yahya’s family members and suggested they had made up the events.
The murder plot came to include Sahar, according to the Crown, when photos of her with boys and dressed in revealing clothes were discovered and a younger sibling spotted her at a restaurant with her boyfriend and reported it back to the parents and Hamed.
The photos, which the defence claimed were found after the deaths, were recovered by police in a suitcase in Hamed’s room. They were in a pocket that also contained his used boarding passes from a trip to Dubai to meet his father earlier in June.
Geeti and Amir were also killed because they had also been involved in acts of betrayal and couldn’t be counted on to tell the same story after the deaths, according to the Crown’s case.
While the jury had a significant amount of evidence to consider, more than 160 exhibits and testimony from nearly 60 witnesses, most of that evidence was circumstantial.
It included computer searches made on the Shafia laptop, most often used by Hamed, for things like “Where to commit a murder,” “Can a prisoner have control over his real estate,” and other various searches for bodies of water.
It also included seemingly damning wiretaps of the accused discussing the state of the Kingston Locks at night, making disparaging remarks about the women and, in Shafia’s case, remarks about the value of family honour.
The jury saw a series of police interviews with the accused where they at first all told the same story about the accident, but Yahya later claimed she had been there and fainted when the car went into the water. She later recanted that story.
They heard from collision experts who talked about damage on the Nissan that was consistent with coming into contact with the family’s Lexus SUV.
They heard from the motel manager in Kingston who recalled Hamed and Shafia checking in that night and telling him there would only be six guests in two rooms. He recalled them leaving after check in and seeing only one vehicle.
There was evidence given from teachers and social workers who talked about the girls’ complaints about abuse at the home. Cultural experts were brought in to explain the concept of honour killings and to tell the jury why some of the vulgar expressions on the wiretaps weren’t that offensive in the Shafia’s native Dari.
They heard arguments from the defence about a timeline of the night, based largely on cellphone records, which the lawyers said proved the accused wouldn’t have enough time to drown the women after reaching Kingston just before 2 a.m. and for Hamed to reach Montreal, where his phone was recorded at 6:48 a.m. on June 30.
What they didn’t hear was exactly how the women died. They drowned, that’s certain according to the forensic pathologist who signed off on their post mortem exams.
However, the Crown could not conclusively tell the jury where they drown or why they sat seemingly calm in the Nissan with the window open and in relatively shallow water when they plunged to their deaths.
There was no evidence of any drugs in the women’s systems, according to toxicology reports.
3 of the victims had bruising on their heads
The Crown’s theory was they were drowned elsewhere or incapacitated then put in the car. That was supported by evidence of fresh bruising on the heads of three out of the four women
The car was in first gear when it was pulled from the water with the ignition off. The headlights were also off, the girls weren’t wearing seatbelts and the seats were reclined at an awkward angle.
This, the prosecution told the jury, supported the theory that they were placed in the car which was then pushed into the Locks by the family’s SUV. Pieces of the SUVs headlights were found at the scene.
However, the defence argued, without conclusive proof of how the car went into the water, no one would know exactly what happened that night and it may well have been an accident.
Hamed Shafia told another version of the events that night to a private investigator hired by his father after the arrests. He said that he followed the girls and rear ended the car by accident when they stopped short at the locks.
While he was picking up pieces of the broken headlight, the car plunged in the water as the driver was trying to turn around. He rushed over, called their names, dangled a rope in the water, but when no one responded he took off to Montreal and didn’t report the incident because he said he feared his father’s anger.
He then staged an accident in Montreal to cover the damage to the SUV.
Hamed’s lawyer told the court in his closing arguments his client was guilty of being “stupid” but not murder.
The jury, comprised of seven women and five men, listened to more than 40 days of proceedings that included delays for a health emergency with Shafia, a power outage caused by an ice storm and an evacuation caused by a security threat at the court house.
The judge instructed the jury that it had three choices when it came to a verdict: they could charge each of the accused with first-degree murder, second-degree murder or find them not guilty.
Before they retired to their deliberations, Justice Robert Meranger wished the jury members luck, acknowledging the challenging work they had ahead of them.
“You’re engaged in deciding a very important matter,” he told the jury members shortly before the end of his charge. “Good luck, thank you for listening and thank you for your patience.”
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Cheers.
John A. Harnick
