Tooba Mohammad Yahya and husband Mohammad Shafia and their son Hamed Mohammed Shafia are escorted by police officers into the Frontenac County Court courthouse on the first day of trial in Kingston, Ontario on Thursday, October 20, 2011.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
A man accused of killing his three daughters and one of his two wives showed no apparent emotion in his first interview with police, despite having been told just minutes earlier they were found dead in a car found underwater.
Mohammad Shafia, 58, is accused — alongside his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41 and their son, Hamed Mohammad Shafia — of killing his three daughters and his other wife. They have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.
It is alleged the family killed the three sisters because they couldn't bear the "treachery" of them having boyfriends and they wanted to restore the family's honour. Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were found dead June 30, 2009 in a car submerged at the bottom of a set of locks in a canal in Kingston, Ont., where the Montreal family had stopped on their way back from a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont.
The Crown alleges the family staged the scene to make it look like an accident.
The jury watched a video Friday of a police interview with Mr. Shafia, conducted after the accused had gone to the police station to report their family members missing. No emotion is apparent from Mr. Shafia in the interview, conducted shortly after police told the three they had found the Nissan Sentra underwater and their family members were dead inside.
"I don't know what has happened," Mr. Shafia tells Det.-Const. Geoff Dempster through a Farsi interpreter. "We woke up in the morning, didn't see the car, didn't see the kids. Don't know what's happened."
Det.-Const.Dempster asks if Mr. Shafia has any ideas at all about how the car could have ended up at the bottom of the canal.
"No," he says through the interpreter. "This is the first time such a thing happened."
Earlier in the interview when Det.-Const. Dempster confuses the time the family left Niagara Falls with the time they arrived in Kingston, Mr. Shafia chuckles.
He is also seen on the video telling Det.-Const. Dempster that the whole family checked into the Kingston motel that night, with all four people who were dead in one room, and five remaining family members in a second room. Hamed had chosen to drive overnight back to Montreal, Mr.Shafia said.
The motel manager testified earlier this week that when MR. Shafia and Hamed checked in, they said six people would be staying in the rooms. They then corrected that to nine, but eventually settled on six, with three people in each room, he said.
Court also heard Friday about more inconsistencies in the accused's story from Barbara Webb, who works at the front desk at the police station in Kingston. She said the three came to the station that day and Hamed told her his two sisters were missing and they were in a Nissan.
Ms. Webb said she knew a car had been found in the canal, so she conferred with police then asked the family for more information, at which time Hamed said it was actually three sisters and his dad's cousin who were missing. The family also referred to Rona Amir Mohammad that day as an aunt, though court has heard she was Shafia's first wife.
He married Yahya because Mohammad couldn't have children, and the three lived in a polygamous relationship with Mohammad helping raise the children.
The months leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, court has heard. Zainab ran away for a couple of weeks and the other two girls were contacting authorities, saying they wanted to be removed from the home because of violence, the Crown said in its opening statement.
Mohammad had written a diary detailing a bitter relationship between her and Yahya, as well as her worries that Shafia would kill her.