In a back-and-forth exchange that electrified a packed courtroom, a Canadian-Afghan entrepreneur accused of murdering three of his teenaged daughters and his first wife denied the charge, but nonetheless insisted that what had happened was God’s will, and that the four women deserved to die.
“You believe their actions brought about their rightful deaths, don’t you?” Mohammad Shafia was asked by prosecutor Laurie Lacelle, who hammered him with questions to which he seemed to have few convincing answers.
“Yes,” Mr. Shafia replied.
But he said he took no part in the June, 2009 drowning deaths of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, aged 19, 17 and 13, together with that of Rona Amir Mohammad, 52. The latter was ostensibly Mr. Shafia’s cousin but was in fact his first wife, living with the rest of the family in Montreal, in a clandestine polygamous marriage.
Ms. Lacelle pressed him.
“You believe there’s no value in life without honour, don’t you?” she said.
“My honour is important to me,” Mr. Shafia replied, alternately sorrowful and truculent, speaking in his native Dari and sometimes wagging his finger at the prosecutor as his jointly accused second wife and son gazed intently at him from the glass-walled prisoner’s box. “But you can’t regain your honour with murder – respected lady, you must know that.”
Not until after the four perished did he realize how scandalous his daughters’ conduct had been, he said, manifested in lying, stealing and flirting with boys. Until then, he testified, it was only the eldest, Zainab, who worried him.
When he did learn, it was clear God had delivered retribution – but not through him.
“How is it possible to do this to your family?” Mr. Shafia asked rhetorically. No religion anywhere sanctions such a deed, he said. “I’m a strict Muslim but I’m not a killer.”
“You might do it if you thought they were whores,” Ms. Lacelle shot back.
Mr. Shafia, 59, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their eldest son Hamed, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder. The charges were laid three weeks after the four drowned bodies were discovered in a car submerged in a lock on the Rideau Canal, east of Kingston. In varying accounts of events, the defendants told police a tragic accident had somehow taken place – but detectives suspected murder almost from the outset.
Ms. Lacelle pelted Mr. Shafia with difficult questions.
The deaths occurred in the early hours of June 30, while the 10-member family was returning to their Montreal home from a vacation in Niagara Falls, travelling in two cars.
And on June 27, cellphone records show, Hamed’s phone was in the area of the Kingston Mills locks where the drowning deaths occurred, supporting the prosecution’s claim that an early reconnaissance mission was under way.
Mohammad Shafia told the jury Friday that it was, in fact, he who had the phone, heading for Montreal before turning back to Niagara Falls, and that he was travelling alone. But a day after the arrests, he told police that Hamed was with him at the time.
“On the 27th I was alone,” he insisted in court.
Nor could Mr. Shafia explain why he had failed to tell police that he and his family had twice before visited the locks in 2008. Ms. Lacelle, however, offered a theory.
“You didn’t want the police to know you’d been here before because you knew it would look suspicious,” she said.
There was also disagreement about whether the four victims ever made it to the Kingston motel where the others stayed that night. Mr. Shafia insisted they did, though no one else has ever reported seeing them there.
