Honour on Trial (11 page)

The plan…

WHEN Hamed flew to Dubai on June 1, 2009, he had with him a black Champion-brand suitcase and his Toshiba laptop computer. Shafia had both an apartment in Dubai and an office that he shared with a business partner. The laptop was seized by Kingston Police in a raid on the Shafia home the night before Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed were arrested and charged with the first-degree murders of their family members.

Constable Derek Frawley, a certified forensic computer analyst with the Kingston force, sifted through 278,000 entries on the laptop and found some unusual Google searches. On June 3, for example, someone had entered, in English: "can a prisoner have control over their real estate."

On June 13, Hamed and Mohammad returned home from Dubai. A number of other searches followed, such as "facts and documentaries on murders," and then, on June 20, "where to commit a murder." There was a Google map search centred on Middle Road and Highway 401 in Kingston, an area described by Frawley as being "right by the locks" — the locks at Kingston Mills.

The forensic work performed on the laptop by Kingston Police was one example of the complex high-tech case police were piecing together. Early in their investigation, police had gotten the cellphone numbers of all the family members, allowing Detective Steve Koopman to compile an exhaustive record of the calls and texts that went to and from the phones. On June 20, the day of the Google search for "where to commit a murder," Hamed's cellphone was activated in the Mont-Laurier, Quebec, region, the place where the Shafias would stay three days later.

Police were able to track the movements of the family on their Niagara Falls trip by the signals from the phones as they bounced off towers along their route. On June 24, Sahar's phone was pinging off the Station Road cell tower, just south of the lockstation, from 8:36 pm to 9:16 pm. By 9:23 pm, it was activated at the Centennial Drive cell tower several kilometres away in Kingston's west end. The family drove all the way to Niagara Falls that night, which would have put them there at around 1 am or later on June 25.

The Shafias stayed in Niagara Falls for four days. They didn't appear to do much other than check out the tourist sites, eat fast food, and go to a mall. There was, however, that one aberration. In the middle of the stay, on June 27, Hamed's phone is recorded at the Westbrook cellphone tower several kilometres west of Kingston.

At the trial, Shafia testified that he had decided to leave his family in Niagara Falls and head back to Montreal to complete some business. Police found it odd that Hamed's cellphone, which he claimed he always had with him, would have been with Shafia in the Lexus. Shafia said he, too, was surprised when it rang near Kingston. It was a call from his children saying they missed him, that they were becoming bored in Niagara, and that they wanted him to return — which he did, without ever getting to Montreal.

The police theory was much different. They suspected that Hamed and Shafia were both in the Lexus that day. The reason for their hasty trip: to scout out Kingston Mills, where they had stopped just three days before to use the washrooms, as a suitable place to commit a quadruple murder.

The ruse…

KINGSTON Police asked Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed to come to Kingston on July 18 to retrieve their belongings left in the Kingston East Motel room. The Shafias were also hoping to get their vehicles back — both the Lexus and the Nissan. This was all part of a ruse devised by police.

Once they suspected the three family members of murder, police applied for a warrant to plant listening devices in both the minivan and the home belonging to the Shafias. In Canada, it is both illegal and unconstitutional to intercept private communications using a wiretap without first obtaining a warrant through the court.

At the station, officers asked the Shafias to leave their van unlocked in case it had to be moved. They did so and went into the office. This gave police the time they needed to place a wiretap in the van.

For the next four days, the Shafias would be monitored and recorded from a police centre in Ottawa. Their conversations would be translated into English and carefully scrutinized by investigators. The recordings would provide some of the most damning evidence at trial: the now infamous words of Shafia, callings his daughters "whores," exhorting the devil to "shit on their graves," and vowing that if they ever returned to life, he would take a cleaver to them.

After turning over the belongings, police asked the Shafias if they wanted to go to Kingston Mills to see where their family members had died. They agreed, and the first stop, with the Shafias following the police in their van, was the Kingston East Motel. "We want to take you through what we think happened," a police officer's voice can be heard on the van wiretap. "So we think they [the Nissan] started [from] here, and then the locks are north from here."

Police, of course, didn't believe this version of events at all. They no longer accepted the Shafias' story that the four women were at the motel that night and left on a joyride to Kingston Mills. But they were willing to play along for now.

At Kingston Mills, the three Shafias walked around the grounds. Police then told them that one of the canal buildings had had a surveillance camera operating the night of June 29-30. Of course, this was not true; there was no camera. But the information had the effect police had hoped for.

Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed were barely back in their van and on the highway when Hamed began talking about what the police had just told them.

"They're lying," Shafia told him. "If there was a camera, they'd access it in a minute." Tooba kept returning to the topic. "If there had been a camera, they would have taken it out a long time ago and checked it," she said. "They wouldn't have left it like that. They're just lying; they're trying to sound us out." Then, a few minutes later, she added: "There was no camera over there. I looked around; there wasn't any. If, God forbid, God forbid, there was one in that little house, all three of us [were there], no?"

Tooba then turned the conversation in another direction. "There was a lot of water, not a little … There was a piece of wood. How come it didn't get stuck there?" she asked.

"That piece was far," her husband answered.

"God so took away their common sense, they didn't think they had no business there," Tooba said.

"God knows … his works," Shafia replied. "That night there was no electricity there, everywhere was pitch darkness. You remember, Tooba?"

"Yes," she said.

"There wasn't the slightest glimmer of light or electricity," Shafia told her. "Even that room's light was off."

These conversations could be interpreted in different ways. But the detailed description Shafia provides Tooba — about the lack of electricity and the pitch darkness — would resonate with jurors at their trial.

"You remember, Tooba?" Shafia asked her directly. This was more than conjecture about what Kingston Mills might look like at night. He was sharing a statement of fact. The three were clearly preoccupied on their ride home to Montreal with the thought of a video camera being at the Mills, right down to discussing whether a device could record through a glass window or not.

Then Hamed had a realization: maybe they were being listened to at that moment.

"Right now, the car was at the police place; it was open," he told his parents. "They can fasten something to record your voice." By now, they saw Kingston Police as adversaries.

"They're keeping the car because they want to render a person's morale weak, do you understand, Tooba?" Mohammad said.

As they near home, Tooba rouses from a nap and tells the other two what she has been dreaming. "I just dozed off," she said. "Their boyfriends and all are wandering about, fit and happy. They've gone under ground."

"Damn on their boyfriends," Shafia replied. "To hell with them and their boyfriends … filthy and rotten children."

The next day, July 19, the three were driving to see the big house Shafia was building in Brossard. They discussed which bedrooms the surviving children would take and where they would go to school. The children, other than Hamed, apparently didn't want to move. Shafia wondered if they would go to the child protection authorities "like [the] others." He said something unintelligible then, "This is so God's curse wouldn't be coming upon them like it did on the others."

They had a discussion about the oldest surviving daughter, who had assured her mother that she had never had a boyfriend.

"Tooba, they said the same thing," Shafia replied. Then he accused his other son of knowing about Ammar Wahid, the "Pakistani boy." "Would a son be like that? God's curse on such a son," said Shafia.

Tooba insisted that Zainab found Ammar of her own accord, without help from her youngest brother.

"No, Tooba, he spoke with the Pakistani just now," Shafia insisted. Then his anger turned toward Zainab. "Whatever she threw in our way, she did," said Shafia. "We lost our honour."

The issue now was how would they prevent the other children from following in the defiant, non-compliant footsteps of Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti. Hamed believed the move to another house and a new school would help.

"The important thing is that they are away from these friends and stay away from such friends," Hamed concluded.

But his father's ire was building. "Even if they come back to life a hundred times, if I have a cleaver in my hand, I will cut him/her in pieces," Shafia said. "Not once but a hundred times as they acted that cruel towards you and me. For the love of God, what had we done? What harm did we do to them? What excess had we committed, that they found to rear up and, as Iranians say, undressed themselves in front of boys? … Every night I used to think of myself as a cuckold …

"If we remain alive one night or one year, we have no tension in our hearts [thinking that] our daughter is in the arms of this or that boy, in the arms of this or that man. God curse their graduation! Curse of God on both of them, on their kind. God's curse on them for a generation! … May the devil shit on their graves! Is that what a daughter should be? Would [she] be such a whore?"

At trial, the Crown showed a number of photos taken by Sahar and Zainab on their cellphone cameras of themselves wearing what could be either bathing suits or bras and panties. Sahar had also been photographed with Ricardo Sanchez, her boyfriend, and other young men, while she was wearing stylish modern clothes such as short shorts and low-cut tops.

Shafia was clearly upset that two of his surviving children knew about the photos. "Shameless girl with a bra and underwear," he said. "I swear to God that even those who do ads of such clothes are not like that. And these two others are hiding their photos."

Tooba reminded her husband that two of the surviving children had warned them that "we should be careful of their [Zainab and Sahar's] behaviour." The children were expected to report to their parents about their older siblings, in effect, acting as spies at school. There was, for example, the incident with the younger brother confronting Ricardo Sanchez at the restaurant and the deception he had to practise by kissing Sahar's friend.

Hamed had a plan: "We will pick them up from school and drop them back at school."

"Or," said his father, "if we feel that it is not working that way, we will move back to Dubai."

Police listening in on these conversations were no doubt concerned for the remaining children. If, as they suspected, it only took the perception of bad behaviour to get four family members killed, might it also happen to the others?

The next evening, July 20, another wiretapped conversation in the van had Shafia defending his relationship with his dead daughters, insisting he never meddled in their affairs. But he was clearly still obsessed with Zainab's behaviour. Tooba said he called her "filthy." Shafia insisted he would only have said that in relation to her "sinning and fornication."

"They're gone now. Shit on their graves," he concluded, hardly the words of a grieving man who'd lost three of his daughters just three weeks earlier.

Less than an hour later, the wiretap continued with this statement by Tooba: "I know Sadaf [Zainab] was already done, but I wish [the] two others weren't."

Shafia replied: "No, Tooba, they messed up. There was no other way … No, Tooba, they were treacherous. They were treacherous. They betrayed both themselves and us … For this reason, whenever I see those pictures, I am consoled. I say to myself, 'You did well. Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again.' That is how hurt I am, Tooba. They betrayed us immensely. They violated us immensely."

The next night, Shafia continued telling himself he had done the right thing.

"Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows, nothing is more dear to me than my honour. Let's leave our destiny to God and may God never make me, you, or your mother honourless," he told Hamed. "I don't accept this dishonour … Either you see them doing those bad things or hear that they did, but they did wrong."

Shafia was offended by his daughters' actions at a deeply personal level. "There is nothing more valuable than our honour," he said. "I am telling you now and I was telling you before that whoever play[s] with my honour, my [answer is] the same … There is no value of life without honour."

If there was a Crown case to be made that the deaths of Rona, Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti were motivated by honour, it came from Mohammad Shafia's own words, repeated over and over on the wiretaps.

The photos Shafia ranted about would become a heavily contested matter at trial. When police raided the house on July 21, they found many of the pictures of Zainab, Sahar, and Rona in the suitcase Hamed had taken to Dubai to meet up with his father. It was the Crown's contention that these prompted Shafia to plot and carry out the honour killings of his children.

The arrests…

ON the evening of July 21, Kingston Police arrived unannounced at 8644 rue Bonnivet with Montreal police officers and child protection workers.