This is a very involved and twisted story of an islamic mother and father on trial in Canada for the murder of their three children - like most honor killing trials, it deals with how the young girls shamed the parents and Islam but what makes this more involved is the fact that the parents tried to cover the murders by presenting this as an "accident."
The story comes from The Star. Read how the spirit of Mohammed commands those under his spell to kill their own.
DiManno: Alleged murder plot targeted ‘treacherous’ daughters, court told
KINGSTON, ONT.—The secret life of dead girls: A biography in cellphone pictures.
Boldly, even sensually, the Shafia sisters posed to document their own brutally shortened existence.
Here is Zainab, stunningly beautiful, looking out coyly from under long eyelashes. She was the eldest daughter at 19, with a one-day marriage in her past, an engagement in her immediate future. The one who ran away from home, to a women’s shelter, complaining of an abusive family, and then, fatefully, returned home two weeks later.
Sahar, perhaps even more striking at 17, smolders in panties and bra. She was the one who, 40 days after entering the world, was given by her mother to another woman — the first, barren wife in a polygamous marriage — told, here, raise her as your own.
Geeti was only 13, the littlest rebel, a handful, failing in most of her school subjects, caught shop-lifting, sent home from school for dressing inappropriately. Geeti pleaded with anyone who would listen that she wanted to be placed in a foster family. The youngster scowls from a yearbook photo.
And then there was Rona Amir Mohammed, 53, a handsome woman and appendage to the marriage, introduced by the girls as their “aunt’’ but called Mother Rona. She poured her aching heart into a diary.
All dead, their bodies discovered June 30, 2009, in a Nissan Sentra submerged in the Kingston Mills locks of the Rideau Canal, floating gently in their vehicular coffin, long hair wafting.
An opening statement is not evidence, merely a preview of the case the prosecution will mount in coming weeks based on testimony, forensics, wiretaps, documents and a plethora of photos. The crux of it: That parents and 18-year-old brother planned and executed the murders from outrage over the intolerable, the defiance of daughters and the alliance with them of a woman treated for years as a burden and a slave.
A disgrace and shame to their family, though, for behaviour unbecoming to Afghan females — the boyfriends and the disobedience, the brazen disrespect for traditions and refusal to wear the hijab — violations of decorum so grievous that they needed to be killed, eliminated, to purify family honour, their “treachery’’ insupportable.
Mass murder committed, a court heard Thursday, by the mother and father and brother of the sisters, homicides staged to look like an accident during a family vacation, with Zainab at the wheel, on one of her furtive joyrides.
Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed Mohammed Shafia have all pleaded not guilty to four counts each of first-degree murder. Their jury trial began here Thursday with a 90-minute opening statement from Crown Attorney Laurie Lacelle that left observers in the courtroom stunned over details finally revealed and allegations of a diabolical plot that defy imagination.
From a wiretapped conversation Shafia had with Tooba and Hamed, 20 days after the bodies were discovered, Shafia in a fury recalling the revealing cellphone pictures of Zainab and Shahar: “Curse God on both of them. Is that what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore? May the devil s--t on their graves.”
And later, not long before the trio was arrested in Montreal, Shafia tells Hamed, as Lacelle quoted from another wiretap transcript: “Even if they hoist me up on to the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honour.”
To his wife, Shafia allegedly assured that the right actions had been taken: “I say to myself, you did well. Were they to come back to life, I would do it again. No Tooba, they messed up. There was no other way. They were treacherous. They betrayed us immensely. There can be no betrayal worse than this. They committed treason on themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion. They betrayed everything.”
From the sisters, there appears no words were left behind. But Rona wrote in her diary, the Crown told the jury, what she was thinking, fearing, in the weeks, even years, before her death, anxieties she also shared with siblings overseas when she was able to get out of the house and make phone calls.
“She described her life, how Shafia’s treatment of her deteriorated after the second marriage,” said Lacelle.
Rona wrote bitterly that Tooba had separated her from their co-husband, took her money, gradually limited the nights Rona and Shafia were permitted to sleep together, threatened to throw her out of their triplex Montreal apartment. “Miserable me, who wouldn’t question Shafia about anything,” wrote Rona, “who swallowed everything because I had no choice.’’
Tooba allegedly told her: “You’re not his wife. You’re my servant. Your family got rid of you. Who would want a dead weight around its neck? Your life is in my hands.”
The family emigrated to Montreal in 2007 after spending about a decade in Dubai, Pakistan and Australia. By then, Tooba had borne Shafia seven children. But there was deep friction in the household, with the daughters claiming to police, teachers and child welfare authorities that they were abused by their father and Hamed. Even their younger brother, a 12-year-old child, scolded Sahar once when discovering her in a restaurant with a boy. The males of the family, regardless of age, felt entitled to discipline the girls.
Zainab, when it was found she had a boyfriend, was kept away from school for an entire year. And when Sahar, after an argument with her mother, apparently made an attempt at suicide, Tooba told a worried Rona, court heard: “She can go to hell. Let her kill herself.’’
At one point, somebody called 911 and four of the children were discovered on the street near their home. Police responded and were told by the children that their lives were in danger. Child welfare authorities came to the house but, when Shafia arrived during the interview, the girls changed their story. The file was shortly thereafter closed.
Zainab, just six weeks before the “accident,” married her Pakistani boyfriend but that union was annulled the same day and the teenager allegedly agreed to a betrothal to her mother’s cousin.
Family dynamics seem to have been smoothed out when the clan of 10 — including Rona, mystified as to why she was being included — left Montreal in two vehicles for a vacation that took them to Niagara Falls. On the return journey, as Shafia told police later, they stopped late on the night of June 29 at the Kingston East Motel. It was then, Shafia said, that Zainab asked for the keys to the Nissan in order to retrieve clothing.
But in the Crown’s version of events, the parents and Hamed had been planning for weeks to do away with the sisters and Rona. The jury will be presented with evidence, said Lacelle, that a computer owned by Shafia and used by Hamed had been used to conduct Google searches on “where to commit a murder’’ and “can a prisoner have control over their real estate?” Various bodies of water were explored, online, along with boat rentals and other suspicious subjects.
Cellphone records, said the Crown, will show that Sahar’s phone received a text message at 1.36 a.m., June 30, 1,300 metres away from the Kingston Mills locks. After that, everything went to call-forwarding.
The jury heard that forensic evidence will put Shafia’s second vehicle, a Lexus SUV, at the locks that night. In the prosecution narrative, the Lexus was used to push the Nissan into the water, after which Hamed drove the damaged Lexus to Montreal where he allegedly staged a parking lot accident to explain the broken front headlight. Pieces of that headlight and casing, found in the family garage and at the lot, were later put together by investigators with shards of plastic and metal collected from the locks crime scene.
In another version of events, which Hamed gave to a university student hired by his father to assist in the case, he claimed to have followed his sister from the motel, worried because she didn’t have a driver’s license and that an accident might occur. They stopped at a closed gasoline station, said Lacelle, and Zainab — with her sisters and Rona in the car — agreed to go back. In this scenario, they were looking for a place to turn around and came upon the locks vicinity. In the confusion of the unlit area, Hamed sit he hit the Nissan, causing the headlight to break.
“While picking up the pieces, he heard a splash,’’ recounted Lacelle.
It was the Nissan tipping over the stone ledge of the northernmost lock and into the water, said Hamed. He sounded his horn, allegedly jiggled a rope in the water but did not try to rescue the victims. After 15 minutes, seeing no sign of life, he left “because he had something to do,’’ as quoted by Lacelle. And he never told his parents about what happened. “He was afraid police would blame him for allowing Zainab to drive without a license,’’ was how Hamed explained his actions to the student.
Hamed would return to Kingston from Montreal the following day, in a third family vehicle. Shortly after noon, all three would present themselves at a police station.
Their car was missing, they said.
Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona were missing, they said.
Not far away, a crane was winching car and females out of the canal.
All but Geeti were later found, at autopsy, to have bruises at the top of their heads — injuries suffered while they were still alive.
Cause of death, the jury will hear, was drowning. Where and when, however, cannot be determined.
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