Honour on Trial (18 page)

And he accused his great-uncle, Latif Hyderi, of bullying Zainab into marrying his son, Hussain, on the day her marriage to Wahid was dissolved. "Latif told her, didn't ask her, you're going to marry my son now. Zainab was crying," he recalled. By the time they returned home that day, Latif "was making arrangements and setting dates already."

His recollections now were much clearer about what happened after they checked into the Kingston East Motel. "I wasn't actually asleep. I was lying down," he said. "After a few minutes, I remember Zainab coming in and asking for my cellphone."

Kemp pointed out that, in the video interview, he hadn't been so certain. "When I think about it, I can clearly say it was Zainab," he said.

The young man also said Zainab was eager to drive and that he once had to convince her, when the two of them were driving around the motel parking lot in Niagara Falls, not to take the Nissan out onto the street. "Zainab really wanted to get her driver's licence," he said.

The young man also took responsibility for one of the Google searches on the laptop computer, the one titled, "where to commit murder."

"When I was suicidal, I was trying to find ways and I would search stuff on the Internet like that. I wasn't familiar with the term suicide. I thought murder was the same thing," he said.

In Islam, suicide is strictly forbidden as it is an affront to God, who is the only one who can determine life and death. Yet in the pre-trial interviews, and at the trial, the subject of suicide comes up often in relation to the Shafia children. Statistics tell us that suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds, and the sixth leading cause of death among 5-to-14-year-olds. Teenagers often experience overwhelming feelings of stress, confusion, and self-doubt, along with other fears while growing up. For some teens, suicide may appear to be a solution to their problems. For the Shafia children, stress levels were often very high, as evidenced by their fear of their father and their many pleas for help to teachers and outside agencies.

On the next morning of the trial, Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis accused the young man of fabricating the story about being at the motel room.

"Zainab never came to the room asking for a phone," said the attorney. "I am just putting it to you. Do you agree?"

"No, I don't," he answered.

Laarhuis said it was actually his mother asking for the phone so they could call Hamed who was on his way to Montreal in the middle of the night. "The story was supposed to be [that] Zainab came and asked for the keys. You got mixed up. You said she came and asked for a cellphone."

Laarhuis then presented evidence from a police wiretap from the night of July 21, when the young man, just taken out of the home along with his sisters, called Hamed. Laarhuis said it was clear from their conversation that he was trying to assure Hamed that he'd given no information to police.

"You didn't want to help the police find the truth did you?" Hamed asked him.

"I told him [Hamed] everything I knew," he replied. "I'm telling him to say what happened. Tell the police what happened."

It's also clear that by the time of this recorded conversation with Hamed, the young man knows and understands the word "suicide." He is pleading with his brother not to make matters worse.

"Don't do anything stupid. 'Cause, Hamed, [if] you guys think of suicide and all that, don't do it, okay?" he tells him. "Look, Hamed, you are 100% caught," he continues.

Hamed warns him to be careful about what he says because the phone may be bugged. In court, Laarhuis accused the young man of already knowing at that point how his sisters and Rona died and who did it.

"The only issue in your mind during this phone conversation was whether police had enough proof," said Laarhuis.

"Enough false proof, yes," he countered.

When the call ends at 3:04 in the morning, Shafia asks Hamed what the police were saying to the younger children and how they responded.

"They said, police from Kingston came and said [they have] 100% proof that the Lexus vehicle hit [the Nissan] from the back," Hamed tells his father. "They [said], for example, uh, we know what happened, why it happened. They asked him lots of things. He said we said the same things."

"[What] they saw in the hotel?" Shafia asks.

"Yeah," says Hamed.

Laarhuis would return to the young man's suicidal feelings, which seemed to heighten around the April 17 when Zainab left the home for the shelter. Yet he couldn't recall the incident in which Sahar had taken pills herself and reported her feelings to school officials and youth protection workers.

"Sahar wasn't suicidal," he said, chalking it up to one of the pranks they played on their teachers. He said the intent of his Google search for "where to commit a murder" was really meant to be how to murder yourself.

"This wasn't some random group of words," Laarhuis suggested.

Even after admitting he read Rona's diary, describing how bitter her life was, the young man described her as being happy and having "many friends."

"Where do you draw the line," Laarhuis asked him, "on manipulating people and telling lies?"

"When it goes too far, I guess," was his answer.

Laarhuis pointed out to the young man that in his testimony he made significant changes to the stories he told police three years earlier. "Where your memory has improved, it's all to the benefit of your mom and dad and Hamed," said the lawyer. "Where your memory hasn't improved are [the] things that aren't helpful to your parents."

The trial continues…

AS the trial broke for Christmas on December 14, it was unclear whether Tooba and Hamed would be called to testify in the New Year. The non-communication order preventing the Shafias from talking to their children in Montreal was vacated after being in place for three years. Then lawyer Patrick McCann told the court that his client Hamed Shafia would take the stand.

When the trial resumed on January 9, 2012, it wasn't Hamed but his mother, Tooba, who made her way to the witness stand. Tooba's lawyer, David Crowe, led her through her early life. Born in Kabul, Tooba said she came from a family of 16 children. Her father, a pharmacist who owned three drug stores in the city, had 10 sons and six daughters with two wives. Her father's first wife died of breast cancer and Tooba's mother was a divorcée. Most of her siblings were university-educated with professional jobs. Tooba only got to Grade 7 because life was interrupted by the war in Afghanistan. She was home-schooled before being married to Shafia in 1988.

Tooba confirmed that before their family left Dubai for Canada in 2007, there had been an agreement reached with the children. "We decided that until the child graduated, they are not allowed to have a girlfriend or boyfriend or get married," she told the court. There was no physical punishment in the home except the single time Shafia slapped the children when they came home late.

"Shafie had one custom — he used to talk. He used to talk a lot," she said. "If it was a small thing, he made it a big thing." Tooba said the children were tired of his incessant nagging about small issues so they kept information from their father.

Crowe raised the issue of Rona's being restricted in her telephone use in the home and having to make calls from a pay phone in the park. Tooba said it was directly related to one incident in which Rona made a call that lasted 75 minutes while the school was unsuccessfully trying to contact the home.

"I told her very nicely and she said, yes, it was the wrong thing to do," Tooba recalled. She knew nothing about what was in Rona's memoir, having only seen it when the family cleaned up the house and put it in a closet where it was later found by police.

Tooba had a different take on the incident in which Sahar attempted suicide. Her daughter didn't ingest pills, she said, but a preservative used to keep flowers fresh. She also thought her daughter was prone to exaggeration.

"Sahar had a habit," said Tooba. "If she was missing a movie she wanted to see, she would say, I'll kill myself." Tooba said Rona returned from a walk that day to discover Sahar, her adopted child, in distress. "Rona yelled at me," she recalled. "She swore at me. This is what I remember." It was on one such occasion that Rona recorded in her diary that Tooba said, "She can go to hell. Let her kill herself." Tooba denied she ever called Rona her "servant."

In her two interviews with police, Tooba told different versions of what happened on the night of June 29-30. In the first, she had stayed with the four women in the Nissan while Hamed and Shafia went to find a motel. In the second, she told rcmp inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh that she waited with them at the locks and, when they returned, she and Hamed were together when they heard the Nissan splash into the water.

On the witness stand, she had a new story to tell. She was now saying that they never went to the locks that night but specifically waited in the car along Highway 15 while the men went just down the road to the Kingston East Motel.

"I was very tired. I reclined the seat and I lay down. I don't know how long it took them," she said.

The men returned in the Lexus and she followed them to the motel. This differs from Hamed's and Shafia's versions. They said by the time they were pulling out of the motel lot to go back to the Nissan, Tooba was already driving in their direction. The motel manager said he stayed up for at least a half-hour watching for the Lexus to return. It didn't. He never saw the Nissan at all.

Tooba still insisted that everyone, including Rona and her daughters who died, got to the motel that night. She and Shafia and their three surviving children were in their room when "there was a knock at the door. Zainab came and said, 'Mother, can you give me the keys to the car because there's clothing in the trunk [and] I want to get it.'" Tooba changed for bed and went to sleep.

"I don't know anything until the next morning," she told the court.

Tooba's explanation for the story she told Mehdizadeh about hearing the car go into the water was that she was only trying to protect Hamed. She claimed to have gotten only "three hours totally" of sleep from the time of the deaths on June 30 to the day of their arrests on July 21. Specifically, she wanted to protect Hamed from torture. She claimed that when they were arrested, a Persian-speaking female police officer from Toronto told her that Hamed would be tortured with cold water. Tooba said it evoked recollections of torture performed in Afghanistan.

"I didn't want to send Hamed to torture," she said. "I put myself in that spot to show Hamed was innocent … None of that was true. I said this to show I was there to get Hamed out of that position. I didn't know what else to say."

Again, police had placed a wiretap in the police cruiser and recorded the conversation between Tooba and the police officer. What the officer actually told her was that Hamed was arrested and would be cooling his heels and drinking cold water in jail. There was no mention of torture.

Gerard Laarhuis's cross-examination of Tooba began with trying to establish when she might be telling the truth or not, even on the witness stand. Tooba said the only time she lied was during her interrogation, to protect her son. Laarhuis pointed out that she had not been forthcoming at any time about the fact that Rona was Shafia's first wife.

"I didn't see it was necessary to say that to the police," she said. "He was not an immigration lawyer." In other words, she would lie to a police officer but not to an immigration official.

"You said she was a cousin and not Shafie's wife. That was a lie and you knew it," Laarhuis pressed her. ("Shafie" was the named used by both Tooba and Rona to address Mohammad.)

"I had a lot of pain in front of me. I lost my three daughters," she replied.

"Does stress turn you into a liar?" Laarhuis asked.

"In that condition, sir, that wasn't a lie. We told the Canadian government she was a cousin," she said. "Indeed, sometimes when a person is under stress, that person will tell lies."

"Do you feel under pressure now?"

"That pressure, no," said Tooba.

When police searched the house on July 21, they found the black suitcase containing a number of photos of Sahar, Zainab, and Rona inside. It was the Crown's assertion that Hamed planned to take those pictures, downloaded from the girls' phones, to Dubai to show his father that the girls had been deceptive — and that they incited Shafia to kill his daughters and then to make the angry statements captured on wiretaps.

Tooba said she had found Sahar's pink Disney album with the photos of Sahar and Zainab and took them out and hid them in the suitcase sometime around July 4, 5, or 6, just prior to the funerals. This would imply that the photos were not available to provoke Shafia to plan the murders. On July 2, however, the Shafias allowed a CTV news crew into their home to talk about their loss. In the video, Shafia is crying and showing the reporter the pink photo album with pictures of his daughters.

Laarhuis suggested that if her husband had been looking at the album containing the inflammatory pictures of his daughters, "Shafie would be ballistic."

Tooba said there was more than one album of that type in the house. "I can tell you that I have one or two. Maybe one or two," she said.

"Do you have one or two?" Laarhuis continued.

"Two or one," Tooba replied. "We have many albums."

"You're seen flipping through this photo album. It was this one, wasn't it?" Laarhuis asked.

"The one we showed to the media was another one. The one with the naked pictures I didn't show to the media," Tooba insisted.

Frustrated by her answers, Laarhuis arranged to show the actual CTV interview in court. "It's clearly the princess book … we have in the courtroom today," he said after the viewing.

"Yes, that's correct," Tooba admitted, adding that perhaps Shafia didn't flip to the back of the album where the photos were located.

Tooba denied receiving a call from her brother Fazil, warning her that Shafia was plotting to murder Zainab. She also said she had never heard of the concept of honour killing in Afghanistan.