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shafia trial

Mohammad Shafia leaves the holding cell at the Frontenac county courthouse in Kingston, Ontario on Thursday Dec. 8, 2011.Lars Hagberg

An Afghan-Canadian businessman accused of killing three of his daughters and his first wife tearfully told a murder trial he was a doting, tolerant father who gave advice – not orders – to his family.

But in a cold, testy cross-examination, he was told flat-out he was a liar.

Some of the answers Mohammad Shafia gave to co-prosecutor Laurie Lacelle left a couple of jurors rolling their eyes in disbelief, in particular his repeated claims not to have realized how desperately unhappy his children had been in the run-up to the June, 2009 drownings of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, aged 19, 17 and 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, his first wife.

The protagonist in what's alleged to have been an "honour killing" committed to cleanse a stain on the family reputation, Mr. Shafia spoke rapidly in Dari, similar to Farsi, piped through headphones, and many of his loquacious responses were vague. It is unusual for defendants in murder trials to testify.

A short stocky figure of 59, dressed in a houndstooth jacket and grey pants, he insisted his Montreal household had had no real problems. The most discordant note, he said, was Zainab's one-day marriage to a Canadian-Pakistani young man of whom her parents disapproved.

But even that was resolved, Mr. Shafia testified. Certainly he was not happy about the wedding (swiftly annulled), and he was equally dismayed when Zainab fled the home for a women's shelter.

But he bore no grudges, he said. Zainab had sought his forgiveness and he had readily granted it.

As for the other issues simmering within the house, notably the reports of violence filed with school authorities, police and child-welfare workers, and the repeated stated desire of Sahar and Geeti to escape, Mr. Shafia denied all knowledge of them.

"They never had fear," he said. "If they did anything wrong they would hide it because they were ashamed. But they had no fear."

Mr. Shafia was the first defence witness in the trial, which has heard six weeks of extremely powerful Crown evidence collectively portraying him as a tyrant, obsessed with his teenaged daughters' chastity, who ruled the Montreal household with an iron fist.

Along with his second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their eldest son Hamed, 20, Mr. Shafia was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in July, 2009.

Three weeks earlier, the victims' drowned bodies had been discovered in a Rideau Canal lock, east of Kingston, in a submerged Nissan Sentra purchased in Montreal two days before the family went for a short vacation in Niagara Falls, travelling in two cars.

The Kabul-born entrepreneur told the trial that although he was a devout Muslim, his outlook was "liberal," which was largely why he fled his Taliban-controlled homeland in 1992, together with his two wives.

The only lie he told Kingston police, he testified, was in reference to his first wife, who was ostensibly a cousin.

Not so, Ms. Lacelle suggested, citing numerous other statements he made to police before and after he was arrested.

Much of his daughters' behaviour in Canada did upset him, Mr. Shafia conceded, one instance being the discovery of condoms in the family home after the four victims died. Another was pictures of a scantily clad Sahar, and a couple of boyfriends

"My children did a lot of cruelty to me," Mr. Shafia told his lawyer Peter Kemp, who at one point inadvertently referred to the location of bodies as "the crime scene" – a phrase at odds with the defence position that the four died as the result of an accident.

But almost everything troubling about Sahar and Geeti he had learned after they died, he said.

And he was rarely violent toward anyone, he testified. Once he did strike two of his daughters after they stayed out late, but that was the only instance, he said, glancing occasionally at the jury as he spoke.

Mr. Kemp spent much of Thursday morning asking his client to explain some of the many seemingly incriminating wiretapped conversations the three held as police listened in. What did he mean, for example, by saying of the four dead people: "May the Devil shit on their graves"?

Mr. Shafia explained that he meant that the Devil would "check" the graves, and God would decide their fate.

He was also asked to explain telling Tooba, his co-accused: "Whenever I see those [revealing]pictures [of Sahar and her boyfriend]I am consoled, I say to myself, 'You did well.' Were they to come back to life I would do the same again 100 times."

By that, Mr. Shafia said, he meant he would give them the good life he had given them, 100 times over.

Also striking was his response to Mr. Kemp's plain, direct question: "Did you have anything to do with how [the victims]got in the water?"

"I didn't know anything until the 18th of July [19 days after the drownings]when they showed us where the car went in," he replied.

The three defendants have always insisted a strange accident at the Kingston Mills Locks had somehow occurred overnight, while they all stayed at a nearby motel.

Police swiftly suspected foul play, however, concluding the Nissan was clumsily shoved into the lock by the family's second car, a Lexus. The prosecution thesis is that "honour killings" were committed to restore the family's reputation, supposedly disgraced by the victims' immoral conduct.

Mr. Shafia's day in court began as usual. Each morning he and his handcuffed co-defendants are brought in a police van to the ornate Frontenac County Court House, photographers clustering outside the wire-mesh cage that bars the side entrance.

Their home for most of the past 21/2 years has been the Quinte Detention Centre, a bleak little fortified compound in Napanee, a 20-minute drive west of Kingston.

The jail is a far cry from their sparsely furnished but comfortable five-bedroom rental unit in the largely Italian Montreal borough of St. Léonard. And it is still farther removed from the posh house, since then sold, that Mr. Shafia was having built in the suburb of Brossard at the time of his arrest. He had spent close to $900,000 on the land and the building, which reportedly featured two elegant matching bedrooms – one for each wife.

Along with the oldest of the seven children eventually born to Ms. Yahya, Mr. Shafia and his two wives left Afghanistan in 1992. After brief stays in Pakistan and then Australia, the Shafias settled in Dubai for many years, before relocating in Quebec under the federal immigrant-investor program.

Mr. Shafia, Ms. Yahya and the children arrived in Montreal in June, 2007. Five months later, Ms. Mohammad, his first wife, joined them as a visitor, falsely described on her immigration papers as Mr. Shafia's cousin.

His property holdings, which include a $2-million strip mall in Laval, are believed to be substantial.

The prosecution's cross-examination continues Friday.

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