Honour on Trial

by Paul Schliesmann

  Three days later, said Lacelle, Hamed and his father both returned to the Mills where they worked out the final details. They had already enticed Zainab home, luring her with the prospect of a wedding to Ammar Wahid. They let her take a job working at a Harvey's restaurant. By the time the three accused appeared at the Kingston Police station to report the women missing, they were all telling the same story, making sure to interject it into the interviews with police.

  "Zainab took the keys to the Nissan and that's the last anyone saw of her and the three others," Lacelle described as the mantra.

  But several things went badly wrong for the conspirators. They had to use the Lexus to bump the Nissan into the water after it got hung up on the side of the lock wall. Rona's diary emerged, completely authentic because it was written in 2008, when she didn't realize she would soon be dead and it would be used as evidence in a murder trial. And there were the wiretaps, not just with Shafia damning his children over and over, but with Tooba opining that while Zainab was "already done," it was too bad her two other daughters had to be killed.

  During the course of the trial, there was much public speculation about whether Tooba might beat the first-degree murder charge. If the jury was going to have any similar thoughts, Lacelle worked to dispel the possibility. "She was there the moment her daughters and Rona were killed," said the attorney. Not only that, she had stayed with them and kept them calm while she waited for her husband and son to return and finish what they had plotted.

  "Tooba's role was indispensable. Shafia and Hamed needed her to be part of the plan to take Rona, Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti to the locks. They needed Tooba to co-operate with them and not alert anyone to their plans," she said. "That means she was a significant contributing cause to the murders."

  Lacelle went into the evening with her summation. It was a long, turbulent day for the lawyers, court staff, and the jurors. She detailed how involved Hamed was in the murder plot with his computer searches and cover-ups and evasive interviews with police. She tore apart his story about how his sisters died. "The sum total of the effort to save his sisters and Rona was to dangle a rope," she said. "Why not call 911? The truth is, he helped kill them."

  Lacelle said Shafia's testimony, in which he stood by his condemnation of his daughters on the wiretaps, proved how little he valued their lives. "He said these things," she said, "in the shadows of the deaths of his daughters."

  She said the Shafias had plenty of time to commit the murders. The forensic pathologist had confirmed it would only take two to three minutes to render a person unconscious by forced drowning. She asked the jury to remember the injuries to three of the women on the tops of their heads. "That's not a coincidence." Drowning the four women one by one in the basin at Kingston Mills, said Lacelle, was one possible scenario. But as jurors, they did not need conclusive evidence on that point to render guilty verdicts.

  With the car hung up, needing to be pushed in, and the window down with no sign of an attempted escape by the women, Lacelle said they were "already dead or unconscious." "The evidence is overwhelming that this was not an accident. The Nissan couldn't go into the canal under its own power with the ignition off," she said. "They planned it. They deliberated on it and they carried it out together. Shafia said on the wiretap there was no other way. Find them guilty. On the evidence, there is no other way."

  It was 7:07 pm when Lacelle spoke these final words. Justice Maranger dismissed the jury for the evening.

  The next morning, jurors began arriving early with their packed suitcases, ready for a likely stay at an undisclosed local motel. Security again was heavy, with members of the public lined up outside the courthouse starting at 6 am to hear the judge's charge to the jury.

  At 9 am, Justice Maranger started by thanking everyone involved in the case. "This was a trial with a lot of twists and turns, a lot of unexpected events," he told the jury. "No sign of complaint. It was remarkable. You did your jobs very well and I thank you for it."

  It took the judge about six and a half hours to read his 250-page charge, covering all of the essential elements of the case and instructing them that they could find all three guilty of first-degree murder on four counts, or any of them could be found guilty of second- degree murder — or not guilty at all. They did not have to deliver the same verdict for each of the accused. The jury deliberated for about an hour and a half that Friday night before word came back they were stopping until the next day.

  The verdict…

  JUST after 1 pm on Sunday, word got out that they had reached a decision. Events began happening at what seemed like an accelerated rate. News reporters were allowed to file into the courtroom first, followed by dozens of members of the public who somehow found out a verdict had been reached.

  Just before 2 pm, Justice Maranger took his seat on the bench, followed by the jurors. The foreman handed their verdict to the court officer who relayed it to the judge.

  Maranger asked the three accused to rise and he read the verdicts: Mohammad Shafia, guilty on all four counts of first-degree murder; Hamed, guilty on all four counts; Tooba, also guilty on all four counts. Hamed bent over the rail of the prisoners' box under the weight of what he'd just heard and wept; Shafia reached out to hold his son's shoulder.

  The jury was polled, all verifying that they supported the verdict unanimously. One of the female jurors was crying. None of them looked as if the heavy burden they had borne for more than three months had been lifted.

  The Shafias were asked if they had anything to say.

  "We are not animals. We are not murderers. We did not commit murder and this is unjust," said Shafia.

  "This is not just," echoed Tooba. "I am not a murderer and I am a mother."

  "Sir," Hamed told the judge, "I did not drown my sisters anywhere."

  Justice Maranger, however, had the verdicts in hand. "It's difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable, more honourless crime," he said. "The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your twisted notion of honour, a notion of honour founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honour that has no place in any civilized society." Then he sentenced each of them to life in prison with no chance for parole for 25 years.

  The scene on the lawn of the Frontenac County Court House that afternoon was unlike anything Kingston had seen for many years. Dozens of Kingstonians mingled among the news reporters and camera operators and police officers to witness the conclusion of one of the most riveting legal cases in the city's history.

  The Crown attorneys, Lacelle and Laarhuis, along with Detective Chris Scott, approached a bank of microphones to make a final statement. "This is a good day for Canadian justice," said Laarhuis. "It's a very sad day because this jury found that four strong, vivacious, and freedom-loving women were murdered by their own family."

  One man in the crowd voiced his support for the lawyers and police: "Assistant crown attorneys Gerard Laarhuis and Laurie Lacelle did an exceptional job, their passion, their work ethic. They gave these victims a voice when they had none, so I appreciate their work," he said. The crowd applauded.

  Moosa Hadi shouted his disapproval. "This is a lie. This is a miscarriage of justice," he said. Soon after, he was escorted to the edge of the courthouse property, questioned by police, and sent away.

  The side doors of the limestone courthouse opened. Shafia, Tooba, and Hamed walked into the crisp winter air flanked by police officers and guards. They were led to a waiting van and whisked away.

  Honour?

  THROUGH hours of video interrogation, and weeks and weeks of courtroom appearances, hearing the same allegations brought against him over and over again, Hamed Shafia did not waver. The "guilty" verdict had a different effect. His hands holding the rail of the prisoners' box, Hamed bent his head forward and his shoulders sagged. As he wept, his parents reached out to comfort him, the father, briefly, tentatively stroking the son's arm. />
  What had sustained the young man to this point? Even through the most damning testimony, seated in the middle of the box between his parents, he stared straight ahead, intense and seemingly dispassionate. What kept him going? A cultural belief in the righteousness of their deeds? Denial? A deep-seated belief that honour had been restored? Perhaps it was a young man's bravado — the sense that he would beat the odds.

  The Crown had introduced as evidence a school assignment written by Hamed and found in his room when police raided the Montreal home in July of 2009. It barely raised an eyebrow in the courtroom at the time. But following the trial, in hindsight, it seemed more significant.

  "Traditions and customs are to be followed till the end of ones [sic] life," Hamed wrote. "Actually it doesn't matter at all weather [sic] your [sic] close to the community following the specific traditions, or living millions of miles away. Tradition and customs of a person is like his identity and what makes him special even though, living in another country, surely it might feel embarrassing."

  "What does honour mean to you?" a Kingston police interrogator asked Hamed after his arrest.

  "It's like, uh, [if you] don't uh, tell the truth and, uh, how can you live with such a lie for the rest of your life. You can't do that," he answered. According to the 12 jurors in Kingston, Hamed, along with his parents, was living a lie of the worst kind.

  There had been an estimated dozen honour killings in Canada in the decade preceding the Shafia convictions, relatively few compared to the hundreds that occur each year around the world, including the United States. Academics have seen a rise in the worldwide statistics. This may be, in part, a result of better identification of the phenomenon coupled with a willingness on the part of law officials to pursue honour as a motive for murder. As was made clear by Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis's post-trial statements, Canadian law enforcement and justice officials want to send a clear message that such atrocities won't be tolerated here.

  The Shafia murders followed similar patterns to previous cases.

  Aqsa Parvez

  On a December morning in 2007, 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was waiting at a bus stop in Mississauga, Ontario, when her brother, Waqas, 26, and her father, Muhammad, showed up and took her back to the family home. Like the Shafia girls, Aqsa rebelled against wearing traditional clothing and was given little privacy in her home. She wanted to get a part-time job and be able to go out with friends when she wanted. Twice she left home.

  In an interview with police following the murder, her mother, Anwar Jan Parvez, said her husband told her he killed their daughter because "this is my insult. My community will say, 'You have not been able to control your daughter.' This is my insult. She is making me naked."

  When police arrived, they found the girl fully clothed on her bed with blood dripping from her nose. Waqas was not at the scene. The father, who had blood on his hands, confessed to the killing, but police later determined it was the brother who had strangled his sister. His DNA was found under her fingernails, indicating she had struggled to stay alive.

  In June of 2010, the father and brother were sentenced to life in prison for carrying out the honour killing. The presiding judge called Aqsa Parvez's death a "twisted and repugnant" crime carried out for the purpose "of saving family pride, for saving them from what they perceived as family embarrassment."

  He characterized the case as one of abused trust and authority by the father over his daughter and hoped the life sentences would send a message of deterrence "to others that would think of committing a crime like this."

  Jassi Sidhu

  Just prior to the resumption of the Shafia trial in January of 2012, another suspected honour killing case took a new turn when the mother and uncle of a woman killed in Punjab in 2000 were arrested in British Columbia.

  It is alleged that 25-year-old Jassi Sidhu's family was scandalized by her secret marriage in India to a poor rickshaw driver, Mithu Singh Sidhu. The young couple had carried on a secret long-distance relationship for four years. They married in 1999 and the following year they were ambushed in Punjab. Jassi's throat was slashed and Mithu barely survived a savage beating.

  Malkit Kaur Sidhu, 63, and Surjit Singh Badesha, 67, both of Maple Ridge, B.C., were arrested under the Extradition Act after investigators in India found evidence they may have directed the attacks from Canada. Seven people had already been convicted in India for murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder.

  Khatera Sadiqi

  In Edmonton, Alberta, on the evening of September 18, 2006, Khatera Sadiqi, 20, and her fiancé Feroz Mangal, 23 went for dinner and to a movie with a group of friends that included Khatera's brother Hasibullah. At the end of the evening, Khatera and Mangal drove Hasibullah to where his car was parked. Hasibullah went to his car and pulled a loaded Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum handgun from underneath the seat. He then walked back to Khatera's car and shot the couple at close range. Khatera died instantly; Mangal died 10 days later in hospital when he was removed from life support.

  During the month-long trial, witnesses said that Hasibullah Sadiqi was angered by the fact that his sister had decided to get engaged to Mangal without seeking her father's permission even though she was estranged from him. Khatera was also living with Mangal and his family, another decision that witnesses said upset Hasibullah.

  In 2009, the jury found Hasibullah guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

  Aysar Abbas

  In Ottawa in 1999, Canadian citizen Adi Abdul Humaid, originally from the United Arab Emirates, killed his 46-year-old wife Aysar Abbas by stabbing her in the neck 23 times with a steak knife, while they were visiting their son at the University of Ottawa. Humaid, who had an affair with the family maid, said he thought his wife, a successful engineer who controlled most of the family wealth, was sleeping with her business associate.

  Humaid was convicted of first-degree murder and, in a bizarre turn of events, appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to grant him a lighter sentence because he was a devout Muslim who was provoked by his wife's claim she had cheated on him, an insult so severe in the Muslim faith it deprived him of self-control.

  The court refused Humaid's appeal, claiming it "is irreconcilable with the principal of gender equality" enshrined in the Charter of Rights.

  Farah Khan

  In 2000, Muhammad Arsal Khan, 40, killed his five-year-old daughter Farah because he suspected she was not his biological daughter. Khan, serving a life sentence in prison, is alleged to have planned her murder before the family immigrated to Canada in the spring of 1999. He was described as a violent man who hated his daughter.

  He bought surgical instruments in his native Pakistan that were then used to dismember Farah's body, which he disposed of in different locations along Toronto's waterfront.

  Farah's stepmother, Kaneez Fatima, 49, was found guilty of second-degree murder because she did not do enough to stop Khan from killing the girl. Fatima's lawyer told the court that Khan had forced her to help dispose of the child's body.

  Muslim leaders have been quick to condemn honour killings. They are concerned that too often their religion is associated with a practice which, they point out, is not found in any teachings in their holy book, the Koran. As the Shafia trial opened in Kingston in October of 2011, the imam at the local mosque, Sikander Hashmi, told his congregation that there is no honour in murder. "As Muslims, we have a responsibility to stand out for justice," he said.

  Others are hesitant to use the term honour killing because it labels entire ethnic communities based on the actions of a few. Everyone agrees, however, that honour killings are rooted in patriarchal and tribal family systems in which the father, husband, or eldest son exerts heavy-handed control over the women.

  As Shahrzad Mojab noted during her court testimony, honour killings are well-documented as a "cultural practice." When some families immigrate to other countries, they bring with them a concept from their home culture t
hat becomes "frozen in the moment," she said.

  "Globally, [it] is established that the honour killing is on the rise and has transgressed the borders of the region [in which] it has taken place and is now in the diasporas of North America and Europe as well," Mojab said.

  According to Tooba's own testimony, a pact had been made with their children before they left Dubai in 2007 that they would all complete their education before taking on husbands or wives. In the meantime, there would be no dating. This was a notion that would soon clash with the children's new lives and experiences in Canada. Claiming to be "liberal," the Shafia parents, especially Mohammad, were clearly not prepared to adapt to the secular society they were living in. He expected his daughters to behave as pious Muslims and was furious when they refused to accept the strict rules he imposed on them. As Shafia said in one of the wiretaps, if the surviving younger children were similarly disobedient, they could always move back to Dubai.

  In Dubai, as in most of the Middle East, honour crimes are not treated seriously and women who report rape or sexual abuse to police are often charged with a crime themselves. Take the case of a young British Pakistani woman, celebrating her engagement to her British fiancé in Dubai. She was raped by a hotel employee and, when she reported it to police, they charged her and her fiancé with drinking alcohol and having illegal sex.

  In Jordan in 1994, 16-year-old Kifaya Husayn, was tied to a chair by her 32-year-old brother. He gave her a drink of water and told her to recite an Islamic prayer. Then he cut her throat. He then ran into the street, waving the bloody knife and crying, "I have killed my sister to cleanse my honour." Kifaya's "crime" was that she was raped by another brother. Kifaya's murderer was sentenced to 15 years, but the sentence was reduced to seven-and-a-half years, an extremely severe penalty by Jordanian standards.