Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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I hope they enjoy their time in jail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/world/americas/afghan-family-members-convicted-in-honor-killings.html

Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — It began with a puzzling and grisly discovery in 2009: a car submerged in a 19th-century canal lock with the bodies of three teenage girls and a middle-aged woman inside. On Sunday, the father, the mother and a brother of the girls were each convicted of four counts of first-degree murder.

The verdict concluded a complex, three-month trial in which prosecutors described the crimes as “honor killings.” The defendants — Mohammad Shafia, 58; Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21 — and the victims belonged to a family of Afghans who had moved to Canada two years before the crime, in June 2007, under a program for affluent immigrants. Both the woman in the car, Rona Amir Mohammad, and Ms. Yahya were married to Mr. Shafia.

During the investigation of the deaths, police wiretaps recorded Mr. Shafia repeatedly expressing the view, often in graphic, vulgar language, that the girls had disgraced his family by dating and by wearing revealing clothing. Other evidence showed that at least one of the dead girls was so frightened of her father that she sought help from the police to escape the household and be placed in foster care with her sisters, without success.

Mr. Shafia’s solution, prosecutors said, was to murder three of his seven children and Ms. Amir Mohammad, and to try, improbably, to make it look like an auto accident; they presented evidence that the car in the canal, a Nissan Sentra, was pushed there using the family’s Lexus, and that someone in the household had searched the Internet for advice on how to conduct a murder.

The jury delivered its verdict after 15 hours of deliberation. Afterward, Justice Robert L. Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice raised the cultural issues surrounding the case, which, while rarely mentioned directly in court, had become a widespread topic of discussion in Canada, particularly in Quebec, where the family lives.

“It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous, more despicable, more honorless crime,” the judge told the defendants in a courtroom in Kingston, Ontario. “The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women.”

All three defendants said they were innocent. Ms. Yahya said in court after the verdict: “I am not a murderer and I am a mother — a mother!” Her lawyer, Andrew Crowe, said she would appeal.

Under Canadian law, first-degree murder carries a compulsory sentence of life in prison, with no chance of parole for the first 25 years.

A Parks Canada employee spotted the Sentra in the Rideau Canal when he arrived for work at a lock station near Kingston in June 2009. Inside were Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, ages 19, 17 and 13, and Ms. Amir Mohammad, 53, who entered Canada claiming to be Mr. Shafia’s cousin when in fact she was his other wife.

The family stopped in Kingston on the way back to their home in Montreal after a brief holiday trip to Niagara Falls; they bought the Sentra secondhand the day before the trip. Mr. Shafia and Ms. Yahya told police and reporters that Ms. Amir Mohammad and the girls had taken the car on a late-night joy ride organized by Zainab, who did not have a driver’s license. But the police were immediately suspicious.

Evidence presented at trial did not establish exactly how the woman and three girls died. But there were indications that the four victims were already dead when the car went into the canal.

The prosecution built part of its case on conflicting statements and missteps by the defendants — they booked accommodations for only six people in Kingston, even though the family numbered 10 before the killings — but the most compelling evidence came from police wiretaps.

“I say to myself, ‘Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again,’ ” Mr. Shafia said about his daughters on one recording. “They violated us immensely. There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this.”

Defense lawyers argued that the remarks were prompted by the discovery days after the deaths of a photo album showing the girls with boys, although the family displayed what appeared to be the same album to television crews shortly after the deaths.

A diary kept by Ms. Amir Mohammad, who apparently could not bear children, indicated that Ms. Yahya treated her as a servant, and described beatings by Mr. Shafia and by his son Hamed when Mr. Shafia was away on business trips. Evidence at trial suggested that he was also brutal to the girls and feared by them.

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Re: Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

zahil aur janwar dojakh me jayega.

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Re: Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

Oh yeahh..this has been big over here and been going on for a while...

There was once where the Step-brother of this man came to testify and said that Mrs. Amir Mohamed had never complained to him once that she was unhappy in the marriage!!!! Since when would a woman coming from Afghani back-ground ever complain to her husband's step-brother if she was unhappy??!!!! Specially from that generation!

I hope they all rot in jail!

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Re: Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

khule aam behayai aur behgairti pelhane wale bhi dozak me jainge ..

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Re: Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

^^^ thank God you are not the judge of that.

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Re: Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Guilty of Murder

Leave your murderous stone age values where you from or stay there. You do not belong in a civilize society.

KINGSTON—In the middle of the night, I sat bolt up-right in bed, thinking: They got it wrong.

The jury, I mean, about Hamed Shafia.

Now, this could have been flu-fever delirium but, for a moment, a fleeting moment, I considered the alternative scenario and went diving into my heap of court documents for reassurance.

It’s the statement Hamed made in court on Sunday, after being convicted on four counts of first-degree murder, which gnaws at my conscience.

“Sir, I did not drown my sisters anywhere.”

That’s so specific. Hamed didn’t say he never participated in the mass honour killing of four females, all family intimates. He never said he hadn’t bopped the victims on the head to incapacitate them, which the prosecution theorized likely occurred before the quartet was placed in that second-hand Nissan Sentra and steered into the Rideau Canal. He never claimed non-complicity in the merciless act of shoving that Nissan into the water after it probably got hung up on the ledge at the northern-most Kingston Mills lock, requiring a solid nudge over the precipice.

Had that vehicle not been front-wheel drive — meaning the car needed traction for forward propulsion to carry it over the concrete snag rather than tires spinning uselessly as the Nissan tipped and lodged — there would have been no headlight splinters left behind, no paint scrapings from a nearby garbage bin retrieved, no “S” and “E” from the Sentra collected at the scene by cops, no corresponding damage to link the Nissan and the Lexus SUV, the other family vehicle that Hamed drove to Montreal in the early hours of June 30, 2009, staging another “accident” with a guard-rail to explain away the Nissan’s dents and shattered plastic headlight casing.

On such small details, apparently never even weighed by the decidedly clumsy killers — front-wheel drive on a car bought precisely as a vehicle of homicide because Mohammad Shafia, cheapskate that he was, didn’t want to waste a perfectly good Lexus or Pontiac Minivan (the third family vehicle) on a homicide by drowning — did the forensics of this unprecedentedly epic honour killing trial turn. (Shafia, short-pockets, did after all try to wrangle a discount at the Kingston East Motel, hours after wiping out half his family: Teenage daughters Zainab, Sahar and Geeti and his first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, surrogate mother to his seven biological children with “preferred” second wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya.)

Journalistically, it takes a whole whop of words just to back-story this ghastly crime.

Anyway, Hamed, now 21, never took the stand in his own defence at trial, a wise decision by his counsel Patrick McCann, who described his client to reporters — this while the jury was deliberating over the weekend — as “just a kid.” The “kid” — entitled older son, ally of his gruesome parents, author of a high school essay on the importance of maintaining cultural traditions — would have been crucified by the prosecution for his preposterous narrative of events, elicited in a jailhouse conversation by an Afghan interpreter turned amateur sleuth, hired by Shafia to help prepare the case. It was babble, of course, Hamed claiming he’d tailed the Nissan (Zainab at the wheel) to the locks that night, out of brotherly concern because she was an inexperienced and unlicenced driver, then, oops, accidentally bumped the other at that canal location, hearing it splash into the water minutes later as he was scooping up damaged bits from two colliding vehicles, yet somehow missing that aforementioned “S” and “E.”

The Crown could only speculate as to how, where and when the victims were killed. They were undoubtedly drowned — maybe in the turning basin at the locks, maybe elsewhere. We’ve no clue who reached in through the fully open driver’s window and turned off the ignition so that the running lights wouldn’t attract attention or who maneuvered the Lexus up against the Nissan, a kiss of metal before dying.

Perhaps I just don’t want to visualize Hamed — dour, bossy, de facto gatekeeper in the Shafia family home — as an active party to the slaying; as if it’s somehow less repugnant to be a passive enabler, though critical to the scheme, as allegedly was Tooba. Technically it doesn’t matter on the first-degree murder charge and conviction. But I still recoil from the thought of an unholy triad — father, mother, son — killing four members of their family, for so nebulous a concept as “honour.” I want it to be Shafia who did the actual murdering and who will spend the next 25 years pondering what he may have done to his son in the process. “We did well, my son,” he says to Hamed on one of the wiretaps.

In court, after the jury rendered its verdict and was individually polled (upon McCann’s request), Shafia laid a comforting hand on his son’s heaving back, even tousled his hair. Hamed may have been a willing snitch and homicide accomplice, with his dumbass laptop searches on “where to commit a murder” and the provocative photographs of his sisters, Zainab and Sahar, that he apparently waved under his father’s nose. But that’s still four children Shafia destroyed, I think, Hamed as doomed as the rest of them.

It’s depressing that Hamed, who speaks fluent English and was a sophisticated world traveller, who left Afghanistan as a baby, who was well-exposed to Canadian values after his clan settled in Montreal, should have been so regressive of mind. Why did Canadian societal morals have no traction with him? He went to school here, was being groomed as the entrepreneurial heir. Yet he limply submitted to — embraced — the all-controlling “honour” dogma that rendered his two oldest sisters “whores” and the other victims blithely expendable.

I reject, as well, that Islam — as practised by this decidedly non-devout clan — had absolutely nothing to do with the crime as justified in the perpetrators’ heads. Islam certainly does not condone honour killing but it’s impossible to separate out the strands of religiosity from reactionary cultural imperatives. The sheer sweep of the crime is what makes these deaths exceptional. I’m deeply troubled, however, by the qualified condemnation of murder in some quarters and the overt approval of “honour killing” that was offered by some of Tooba’s relatives back in Kabul when tracked down by La Presse reporter Michele Ouimet. Tooba’s brother-in-law observed, chillingly: “If any of (my) daughters dishonoured me, I would put them in a bag and eliminate them so no one would ever find their traces in Afghanistan.”

Violence committed against females in Afghanistan and other deeply patriarchal societies — not all of them Muslim — isn’t limited to honour killings. Take a stroll through the hospital burn unit in Herat or Peshawar to eyeball the horrific injuries inflicted on daughters and wives, often with their own mothers and mothers-in-law involved in the deed. And that villainy has been exported to the West.

Rob Tripp, a Kingston reporter who followed the canal drownings from the beginning — he’s also writing the definitive book on this case — sent me a New York Times story from 1991. The FBI had planted listening devices in the tiny apartment of a Palestinian-American suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. That bug picked up the actual killing of the man’s teenage daughter. Tragically, there was nobody monitoring the intercept as the crime occurred. The honour student’s screams and moans were later played for a jury. As her parents stabbed her repeatedly in the chest, the girl — whose sin was she wanted to be an ordinary American teenager and had allegedly been dating a boy — begged them not to kill her. On the seven-minute tape, the father is heard shouting in Arabic: “Die quickly!” She pleads for her mother to intervene and that woman says: “Shut up!” In court, the father admitted he put his foot on his daughter’s mouth to quiet her.

Yet here we are, more than two decades later, and some apologists would rather debate the term “honour killing,” while some women’s advocates insists there’s nothing inherently exceptional about these crimes, that they should be placed within the spectrum of domestic violence.

You know, that train has left the station. In a Kingston courtroom, the prosecution and the presiding judge called it what it was: An honour killing, as dishonourable a crime that could be perpetrated.

Shafia, I suspect, has not been remotely chastened by his life sentence. In the eyes of those that matter to him, he is a virtuous man.

Finally, many readers have pointed out the date of birth chiseled into Geeti’s tombstone, as shown in a photograph published by the Star. It is the exact birth date as Sahar and clearly an error. I have no explanation for this but I’ll take a guess.

The stone mason made a mistake. And Shafia got a discount.