shafia honour killing trial
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Name: Class: WRITING
Shafia Honour Killing Trial: Mohammad ShafiaCondemned Dead DaughtersFirst Posted: 01/29/2012 7:09 pmUpdated: 01/30/2012 7:53 am
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KINGSTON, Ont. - Two days before Mohammad Shafia was arrested for the
murder of his three daughters and one of his two wives, he went on a cruel rant
about his dead children, cursing and condemning their supposed treacheryand
then he washed his hands.
It was a profound end to a hateful rant from a man found guilty Sunday along
with his son and wife of four counts of first-degree murder committed for reasons
most Canadians would find trivial such as dating.But with that hate-filled diatribe Shafia made it clear he was indeed washing his
hands of his daughters, comparing them to prostitutes, telling himself that he "did
well" and would do the same again if they came back to life 100 times.
"They committed treason themselves," Shafia said on a secret wiretap police
recorded by bugging his minivan.
"It was all treason, they committed treason from beginning to the end. They
betrayed kindness, the betrayed our religion and creed, they betrayed out
tradition, they betrayed everything. Let's stop here, get out and wash my hands and
come back. OK."
It was July 20, 2009, and his daughters and wife had not yet been dead three
weeks. On June 30, 2009, court heard, Shafia, his favourite wife Tooba Yahya, 42,
and their eldest son Hamed, 21, killed three troublesome Shafia daughters and Rona
Amir Mohammad, the unwanted first wife.
They had come up with an elaborate plan to drown the four, then place their
bodies in a car, send it plunging into a canal and make it all look like a tragic
accident.
Trouble in the wealthy Afghan-Canadian family had been brewing for some
time.
The Crown painted a picture of a household controlled by a domineering Shafia,with Hamed keeping his sisters in line and doling out discipline when his father was
away on frequent business trips to Dubai.
Some of the Shafia children followed the rules and the others didn't. The ones
who couldn't be controlled, The Crown said, are now dead.
Rona was not treated much better than an unruly child. And all any of them
wanted was freedom, The Crown said.
Zainab had run away, but that in itself shamed the family, so she was coaxed
back with a promise to marry her boyfriend Ammar. The family viewed him as a
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loser and was not pleased with the relationship, but if she was married she would be
Ammar's problem, not theirs, and her behaviour couldn't affect their honour.
Sahar too was dating, though she tried to keep her Christian boyfriend secret
from her parents. Condoms were found in her room, as were pictures of her wearing
short skirts and shorts, hugging her boyfriend. That clothing caused Shafia to curse
Sahar as a whore after her death.
Two months before she was found in the canal, Sahar told her boyfriend's aunt
that if her parents found out about her relationship she was "a dead woman."
Geeti was becoming almost impossible to control: skipping school, failing
classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing. But her most
egregious breach was telling almost every authority figure she encountered that she
wanted to be sent to foster care.
There was a family code of silence and Geeti broke that, it was alleged. If the
Shafias thought Zainab and Sahar were hard to control, Geeti would be their worst
nightmare. For Geeti, the writing was on the wall, the Crown said.
Rona was Shafia's first wife but, unable to conceive, her status in the Shafia
household began eroding as soon as a young Tooba Yahya was brought in as apolygamous wife.
Shafia beat her and "made life a torture," Rona wrote in a diary. Yahya called her
a servant, held onto Rona's passport and would tell her "your life is in my hands,"
she said.
Rona spent her days wandering the streets, crying, sitting in her room or using
payphones to call relatives, she wrote.
Rona, Zainab, Sahar and Geeti died at the tail end of a family trip to Niagara
Falls, Ont. They were heading back to Montreal and had stopped in Kingston for the
night when tragedy struck
The girls were driven to the canal and killed there
There's also the evidence that nobody tried to escape the car during its plunge
into the water or as it submerged in the canal. The driver's window was fully open,
nobody was wearing a seat belt, and their bodies were found more or less floating
over seatsZainab and Geeti in the front, Sahar and Rona in the back.
The police certainly didn't think [this was an accident scenari], and began to treat
the deaths as suspicious almost immediately. By the time Shafia, Yahya and Hamed
were arrested, the case against them included the intercepted conversations.
Comments mostly made by Shafia on those wiretaps provided the foundation for the
Crown's "honour killing" theory."I say to myself, 'Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do
the same again,'" Shafia says on one. "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."
"Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows...nothing is more dear to me than my
honour," Shafia says on another.