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‘honour killing’ trial

The final hours of four women found drowned in a Rideau Canal lock 2 1/2 years ago were placed under a searing microscope at a murder trial Tuesday afternoon, and as a mother jointly accused of killing them struggled to answer a prosecutor's inquiries, his purpose was clear: To show the jury that nothing she said was credible.

In the witness box was Tooba Mohammad Yahya, the second wife of Afghan-Canadian businessman Mohammad Shafia. Together with their eldest son Hamed, the couple are charged with murdering three of their teenaged daughters and Mr. Shafia's first wife, who shared the family home in Montreal.

Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis itemized damning problems with Ms. Yahya's often contradictory version of events, both in her court evidence and in her statements to police. In particular, he focused on her account of how the 10-member family – or some members of it – came to stay at a Kingston, Ont., motel on the night the four perished.

The defendants' position is that everybody stayed at the motel, as the group returned home from a short vacation in Niagara Falls. The prosecution contends the four victims never got there but, rather, were murdered at the lock, the crime concealed by an elaborate but clumsily staged accident.

Alternately insistent and vague, Ms. Yahya, 42, said she was driving one of the two cars that made the trip, and by her own admission the four victims were in it. But she could not recall details of what the well-lit exterior of the motel looked like, she said, because "it was meaningless to me."

Mr. Laarhuis was incredulous. "It was the night your family died, that's the last time you saw your kids [alive]," he said. "And that's meaningless?"

Much of what the witness said, translated from her native Dari, was so loquacious that twice Mr. Laarhuis asked her: "Do you remember what my question was?"

Ms. Yahya, her husband and their 21-year-old son Hamed are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the drownings of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, aged 19, 17 and 13. Also in the submerged car, discovered June 30, 2009, at the bottom of the lock, was the body of Mr. Shafia's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, 53.

The prosecution theory is that the multiple deaths were "honour killings," chiefly committed to restore the Shafia family's honour that was supposedly stained by the rebellious conduct of the three teens. The defendants, however, claim that a bizarre accident occurred when the four victims took one of the cars for an unauthorized late-night joyride, with Zainab at the wheel.

But even that theory came in doubt Tuesday when Ms. Yahya told the court that, possibly, Zainab had driven into the lock deliberately. "I can't tell you," she said, asked if that's what occurred.

"You still don't know if Zainab intentionally drove a car full of your family into the water, or if it as an accident?" Mr. Laarhuis asked.

Her reply was non-committal. There were other big discrepancies in her evidence.

She wasn't sure who in the family was driving which vehicle on the trip; she was vague about how she came to show a crucially important family photo album to a TV crew shortly after the deaths, even though she said the album only surfaced days later; and perhaps most puzzling, when the Kingston police told the defendants the four bodies had been found, none of them inquired as to the location.

Earlier in the day, Ms. Yahya also conceded to her lawyer David Crowe that she lied to police about events, but said she only did so to protect her co-accused son, whom she feared would be mistreated by police. "None of it was true," Ms. Yahya told Mr. Crowe. "I said it to say: 'Please don't touch Hamed, he's innocent.' I did it to get Hamed out of the situation."

But now, she insisted to the rapt courtroom she was telling the truth.

That admitted lie went to the heart of a question hanging over the trial since it began in October: How did the four victims actually die? So far, multiple explanations have been offered.

The defendants' claim remains that an accident somehow occurred, after Zainab and the others drove away from the motel while their parents were sleeping.

But on the day they were arrested, Ms. Yahya gave a Farsi-speaking RCMP officer an entirely different account of events. In that version – swiftly retracted – she said that on that dark night she was in one of the vehicles with the four soon-to-die victims in a grassy area where there was water. She got out to stretch her legs and was chatting with Hamed – her husband was there too, she said – when she heard "a splash." She ran toward the sound of the noise, but fainted and knew nothing more.

None of that was true, she told the trial Tuesday. What really took place, she said, was version A of events: At the motel, "Zainab came and said: 'Mother, can you give me the keys to the car because there's something I want to get,' " she testified.

And that was the last time she saw her daughter or the other three, she said.

From the outset, Kingston detectives suspected murder.

Ms. Yahya also told Mr. Crowe that in the 21 years she spent in Afghanistan, she had never heard of such a thing as honour killings. Only after she was arrested did she learn of such a concept. Dabbing her eyes, she described the day, hours before the trio were arrested, when her other three children were taken away by authorities.

"I asked them not to," she testified. "They didn't listen to me and I lost my children.… think about it, a mother loses six children, three of them taken by God, what do you think the concerns of a mother would be?"

Mr. Crowe also dwelt heavily on some of the defendants' incriminating conversations, overheard by police on wiretaps in the runup to the arrests. Ms. Yahya offered some explanations.

What did her husband mean, for example, when he said of his dead daughters: "God curse them for a generation. God curse their graduation. May the Devil shit on their graves"?

Such epithets were common in the Farsi language, Ms. Yahya replied, and should not be taken at face value because "he was upset and was not able to control himself."

At another juncture, Mr. Shafia was heard to say: "Even if they came back to life 100 times, I would do this again."

Her husband was referring to the way he had raised his children, Ms. Yahya responded.

Mr. Shafia was also repeatedly heard talking about the "betrayal" his dead daughters had committed.

That was simply a reference to their rejection of traditional Afghan mores, Ms. Yahya said, manifest in revealing photos of the two older girls, ostensibly not discovered until after they died, in the photo album.

But when asked to explain a remark she herself made on the wiretaps – "I know Zainab is done, but I wish the other two weren't" – she spoke at length without shedding light on what she meant.

The cross-examination continues Wednesday.

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