Honour on Trial (4 page)

Ninety percent of the time on dive recoveries, he said, someone is situated "in the proximity of the driver's seat area." In this case, it appeared that 13-year-old Geeti was closest to the wheel.

Newell began the grim task of removing the bodies from the Nissan. First out was the body in the driver's side rear seat, that of 17-year-old Sahar. She was wearing a pair of tight jeans and a sleeveless top. In her pierced navel was a stud with two stones. Her fingernails were painted with purple nailpolish, her toenails with black. "This was the easiest person to access," said Newell. He gently lifted her body out through the door and brought it to the surface.

Next to come out was Rona, the "aunt," seated next to Sahar in the middle of the back seat, her feet resting on the floor. Rona was wearing a blue shirt. There were three pairs of earrings in her pierced ears, and six gold bangles hung from her wrists.

Removing the bodies from the front was more difficult. Geeti was closest to the driver's door but she and Zainab were intertwined, their legs between the bucket seats. Geeti's head was behind the seat headrest, against the doorpost facing into the back seat, and her right arm was around the headrest. Newell brought the little girl's body to the surface next. Underneath her brown shirt, Geeti wore a navel ring, like her older sister Sahar, whom she idolized.

Zainab came out last. Newell described her body as "kind of floating a little bit, which is unnatural for women." Her feet and hands were down as if preparing to touch bottom. Her fingernails were painted a light shade of blue. She wore her black cardigan backwards, buttons done up the back in the latest teenage chic trend. She had ten cents in her pocket.

The interviews…

DETECTIVE Geoff Dempster's blond boyish good looks and laid-back demeanour must have been deceiving as he interviewed and videotaped the three Shafias — Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed — one by one, on the afternoon of June 30. But the youthful-looking officer had already worked three years with Toronto police and ten in Kingston, eight of those years with the sexual assault unit and two with the cold case squad investigating unsolved murders.

Dempster was prepared to offer as much comfort and empathy as necessary. He assumed that before him were the grief-stricken members of a family looking for answers in the deaths of their daughters and the woman they identified as Mohammad Shafia's cousin.

Dempster's supervisor on the case, Chris Scott, would later call the detective's interviews in the first 24 hours "brilliant."

Dempster's trained ear immediately began to pick up discrepancies in what he was being told. Hamed referred to Rona, the deceased woman in the back of the Nissan, as his "aunt." Mohammad called her his "cousin."

The interview process for the parents was laboured. Tooba and Mohammad needed a translator in the room, a Kingston woman who spoke Farsi, a dialect of Persian, relaying Dempster's questions and giving him the answers back in English.

It was a painstakingly slow process, but Dempster persevered. By now, the three other children had been brought to the police station and were also being interviewed by two detectives from the child sex-crime unit, Sean Bambrick and Caroline Rice.

At 3:45 on the afternoon of June 30, Dempster began his interview with Mohammad Shafia by offering his condolences. "I'm very sorry about what has happened today, but to better come to an understanding of why it happened, it's important for us to learn as much as possible and, to learn as much as we can, we need to talk to you and your family."

In the video-taped interview, the two men faced each other over a small table. Shafia was calm, dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt, grey pants, and sandals. He was a short, dark man in his late fifties, balding, with wispy gray hair cut close to his head. He had heavy black eyebrows and deep lines carved in his face. He acknowledged Dempster's condolences without emotion. Then the detective asked Shafia to tell him as much as he could about what had happened, starting anywhere he wanted, and providing as much detail as he possibly could.

Shafia explained that they had taken the children on a vacation to Niagara Falls. He had just returned from an extended business trip about two weeks earlier. "My main base is Dubai," he told Dempster. "I am in Dubai most of the time." The children, according to Shafia, had wanted to go to Niagara Falls — the same place they'd visited the year before.

On the tape, Shafia did not look or sound like a man who had just lost three daughters in a fatal car accident. Was he in shock? The mention of his Dubai business affairs set him off on a tangent; he told Dempster how he planned to transfer his business dealings to Canada and how he had recently purchased a shopping plaza in the Montreal suburb of Laval. "I paid $2 million for it," Shafia told the detective.

Mohammad Shafia came across as a businessman through and through. In later court testimony, he told how he'd gone to work at a very young age in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, to earn money for the family after his father's death.

Afghanistan is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia and bordered by Iran, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. Home to an ancient culture, the country has seen Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British, the Russians, and the Americans cross its borders in an attempt to control and modernize it.

A young Mohammad Shafia, living in Kabul, moved into electronics repairs. With seed money from an uncle, he turned his small shop into a multi-million-dollar import-export business by importing Panasonic radios and Peacock brand thermoses, shipped in from Japan. "It was only me," Shafia would tell the jury at his trial. "I had the monopoly on importing those."

From 1979 to 1989, a major war was waged between U.S.-backed mujahideen forces and the Soviet-backed Afghan government, in which over a million Afghans lost their lives. In the 1990s, a civil war led to the rise of the extremist Taliban government. Canadian troops were deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., their combat role drawing to a close in 2012.

Shafia thrived during the Soviet invasion of 1979 through to their withdrawal in 1989. In 1992, however, his business was interrupted when the mujahideen captured Kabul and Afghanistan erupted into civil war. The Shafias, with two young children, Zainab and Hamed, fled east to Pakistan, setting off a series of moves that would take them to Dubai, Australia and, eventually, Canada in 2007. Shafia always provided for his family, making business contacts in Japan and China. In Canada, he continued to be industrious and successful.

Shafia's interview with Dempster revealed more insights into family life. He said Zainab was engaged to be married. "It was not finalized," he told the officer through the translator. "But we like the connection and she liked it."

Then the questions went back to the vacation. Ten of them travelled to Niagara Falls — seven children and three adults — and they were in two vehicles. It was also established that he, Hamed, and Tooba were the only licensed drivers in the family. Shafia made a point of telling Dempster that Zainab and his other son also knew how to drive, "but they don't have the licence." This bit of information, seemingly out of context at the time, would become another critical piece of court evidence.

Dempster wanted to know how they came to be in Kingston. Mohammad gave an account of the trip from Niagara Falls that started late in the evening, a detour to see downtown Toronto and the CN Tower, back to Highway 401, and a stop at a McDonald's restaurant. He went into long explanations about the smallest details. At Kingston, Shafia recounted, Tooba got tired and they decided to find a motel. He paid $103 for each room. The four women later found dead in the car checked into room 18. Then Hamed went to Montreal.

"Last night?" Dempster asked. Shafia answered vaguely that Hamed had work to do in Montreal, to "check the building or something."

Later in the day, Kingston Police would receive some startling information. Early that morning, just before the car had been discovered in the water, Hamed had reported an accident involving the family's Lexus SUV — not in Kingston, but in Montreal.

Around noon, the three Shafias, including Hamed, had come to the Kingston station in a Pontiac Montana minivan. With the Nissan discovered at the bottom of the Rideau Canal that morning, how many vehicles had the Shafias taken on their trip?

And what had Hamed been doing in Montreal when the family had arrived in Kingston so late the previous night? Police now had more questions than answers in an increasingly complicated case.

Dempster wanted to know who stayed in which room at the Kingston motel. Shafia said the women who died were in room 18, referring to them as "the people who are not now,"?as if they had been apparitions and not his own beautiful daughters who had recently been so full of life.

Dempster pressed Shafia on Hamed's late-night excursion. Shafia told him the family wanted to stay in Kingston for two or three nights "if the kids were happy."

This was one of many inconsistent accounts Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed gave about the early hours of June 30 which would be scrutinized at trial. The Kingston East Motel, practically in the middle of nowhere, was certainly no tourist draw. And why would Hamed drive off into the night by himself in the vehicle that would hold the most people, leaving behind the newly purchased Nissan that barely held five?

Shafia turned to the events of earlier that morning when he got up to find "the car is not there." He discovered that the four women were not in number 18, adjoining 19, after he "pushed and the door opened." (Court would later hear that the doors were self-closing and locked automatically.) The TV was on, he said, and there was some luggage and a Thermos for tea. But no daughters. No cousin.

Shafia said he phoned Sahar and Hamed, but his daughter didn't answer her cellphone. (In fact, the last recorded call on Sahar's phone was at 1:36 am on June 30.) He reached Hamed in Montreal at around 7:30 and told him the Nissan was gone and that he wanted his son to come back immediately to make a report to police.

According to Shafia, the last they saw of anyone from room 18 was when they were all checking into the Kingston East sometime after 2 am. Zainab had come to their room to ask for the keys to the Nissan to get their luggage out of the trunk. "They didn't return the key," he told Dempster.

At this point in the interview, the officer excused himself from the interview room. Shafia didn't realize it, but Dempster was conferring with his colleagues who were watching the interview in another room. He returned with some focused questions to clarify details. Was the car Hamed took to Montreal, in fact, a Lexus? Where did they go in Toronto? Where was the McDonalds they stopped at? How did they communicate between the two vehicles while driving? Who was driving which vehicle on the approach to Kingston?

This last question would become one of the most puzzling and frustrating to get the Shafias to answer — right down to the end of the ensuing trial.

Dempster left the room again. Shafia, who had just lost three teenaged daughters, sat with his head against his hand, sighed occasionally, and shuffled his feet while the Farsi interpreter watched silently from the corner.

Dempster re-entered the room. What did Shafia think happened last night?

"I don't know. I don't know what has happened," he replied. "I just woke up in the morning and didn't see them. That's it. I don't know anything else."

Several weeks later, while being monitored on a wiretap placed in his van, Shafia had some unsettling and ugly comments to make about his daughters' deaths. For now, however, he was calm and in control. At 5 pm, Dempster ended the interview.

The Montreal accident…

MONTREAL police constable Nathalie Ledoux was working traffic patrol the morning of June 30 when she was dispatched to respond to a 911 call in the parking lot of a shopping centre in St. Leonard, a suburb of Montreal, just a few minutes' drive from the Shafia home on rue Bonnivet.

When Ledoux arrived at the shopping centre at 8:03 am — about the same time canalman John Bruce was arriving for work at Kingston Mills — Hamed Shafia was there with the Lexus. He told her he had driven the SUV into a yellow guardrail beside the Intermarche grocery store. The left headlight was smashed and, after taking measurements, the officer could see that the damage matched up with the height of the barrier. She noted debris from the plastic lens beneath it.

What the 15-year veteran of the city police force couldn't understand was why Hamed chose to park where he did. The lot was virtually empty at that time of the morning. He had his choice of parking spots closer to the storefront. The guardrail was around the side of the building, protecting a garbage shed.

"I found that quite [peculiar]. He could have taken an easier way," Ledoux later told the court through a French translator. "Why would he have put himself in a corner in a complicated manoeuvre?"

Ledoux recalled Hamed being "very calm" as he explained what happened. "The only thing he asked me was, 'Can I get my vehicle repaired immediately?'" Ledoux told him he could not if there was an outstanding insurance claim.

Later that day, Ledoux got a call at home telling her that the Lexus incident she'd investigated early that morning might be "linked to another kind of crime."

Gathering evidence…

AS soon as Kingston Police learned about Hamed's accident in Montreal — on the same day he and his parents reported Rona, Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti missing — they knew they had to get to Montreal to see the Lexus. Detective Steve Koopman drove on July 1 to the Holiday Inn Express, where the Shafias were now staying courtesy of Kingston Police.

Koopman brought Mohammad Shafia back to police headquarters where they sat down at 11:09 am for another video-recorded interview. The interpreter who had helped with the previous interviews was also there. Koopman wanted Shafia's permission to go to Montreal to inspect the damage to the Lexus. But first, the officer had a few other matters to clear up, in particular, why Hamed had made the late-night trip to Montreal and returned in the minivan.