Honour on Trial Page 4

KINGSTON Police forensic identification officer Robert Etherington joined the Kingston Mills investigation on July 2 when he accompanied the bodies of the four women to Ottawa General Hospital, where autopsies would be performed by the pathologist, Dr. Christopher Milroy. It was a long day for Etherington who was at the morgue in Kingston General Hospital at 6 am to sign out the bodies. The examinations, which he photographed, ended at 6 pm. He got back to Kingston just before 9 pm and was immediately sent to the Kingston East Motel to complete more forensic work and to photograph the contents of rooms 18 and 19.

  On the morning of July 3, Etherington signed out the pieces of plastic retrieved two days earlier from the garage at 8644 rue Bonnivet. Then he looked at Julia Moore's forensics photos from Kingston Mills, particularly the pieces of plastic found in the grass and at the lock edge. It was a moment of revelation for Etherington. "There could be an association between these pieces," he recalled in court. In other words, if the pieces of plastic found at the lock matched the pieces from Montreal, it would place the Lexus at Kingston Mills.

  Etherington immediately contacted his boss, Inspector Brian Begbie. "I advised him that these pieces appeared to fit together." Etherington knew he was on to something. "I believed it was fairly important, yes. These pieces shouldn't match to that turn signal according to the story we knew at the time," he said. "The vehicles were very important and obviously the scene was important, and something was going on we didn't know about yet."

  The case was upgraded that day to a homicide investigation, though police didn't make that information public right away.

  The plastic shards would be sent to the Centre of Forensic Science crime lab in Toronto, where it was determined that the pieces from Montreal and Kingston Mills were, indeed, "once part of the same vehicle."

  Growing suspicion…

  "ONCE we had that physical evidence, we had concerns about the response from the family, such as [them] withholding information about the accident in Montreal," recalled lead investigator Chris Scott. "What's a typical response when you have four family members taken from you?" Clearly, not what police were hearing and seeing. There were also growing concerns for the surviving three children.

  "We still had the [other] children in that family," said Scott. "You don't know the dynamics in the household."

  Although police thought the Shafias' reactions were atypical, denial is not an uncommon response to the shock of losing a loved one to homicide. Nor are anger and rage. Although the anger is usually directed at the perpetrator of the murder, survivors can also be angry with the victim, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for having a lifestyle that put them in danger. Feelings of guilt and intense anguish can sometimes last for years.

  According to Eric Schlosser, in his book A Grief Like No Other (1997): "In the days and weeks right after a murder the victim's family is often in a state of shock, feeling numb, sometimes unable to cry. The murder of a loved one seems almost impossible to comprehend. Life seems unreal, like a dream. Survivors may need to go over the details of the crime again and again, discussing them endlessly, as though trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle, struggling to make sense of it all."

  Men may have difficulty grieving because they have been socialized to believe that real men should keep their feelings to themselves — expressing them is seen as a weakness. This would be even more likely in someone coming from a patriarchal culture like Afghanistan.

  It's no wonder the police were confused by and even suspicious of the Shafias' responses. Nevertheless, the evidence, plus their gut reactions, were telling them something was not right.

  Scott credits detectives Dempster and Koopman with conducting those early videotaped interviews with the Shafias.

  "I thought it was brilliant in those first 24 hours — Detective Dempster's interviews with Hamed when he asked, 'Were you there?' The physical response was telling. It wasn't like a shock. If you're being interviewed the day four family members were found and you were asked were you there, you'd be incensed," said Scott.

  Koopman's interview with Mohammad Shafia on July 1 was all about obtaining consent so investigators could get to the Shafia home in Montreal quickly and without a warrant to examine the Lexus. Over and over again, he got Mohammad to say that it was fine for police to go to his home on rue Bonnivet. "I conducted the full video so the judge or jury could see he was fully aware of it," said Koopman.

  Meanwhile, Kingston Police grappled with the puzzling actions and statements of the Shafias.

  Koopman had already begun to gather and analyse the cellphone data that would piece together the Shafia family's movements between June 23 and 30, from Montreal to Niagara Falls and back to Kingston.

  The examination of those records revealed an aberration: on June 27, while the family was in the middle of their stay at Niagara Falls, Hamed's phone registered on the cellphone tower at Westbrook, just west of Kingston. Police and the Crown concluded that Hamed and Mohammad must have travelled to Kingston Mills to more precisely plan the murders. At the ensuing trial, Mohammad Shafia claimed he was alone in the Lexus and heading to Montreal on business when his family called to say they were bored in Niagara and wanted him to return. Hamed's phone, he testified, just happened to be in the vehicle.

  "They tried to make [out] that Shafia could have been in the vehicle with the phone. What's interesting is we had Hamed on video saying he always had his phone [with him]," said Scott."He didn't even want to give it to his dad to go to Montreal on July 1," added Koopman. "It's weird a son is so attached to his phone he wouldn't give it to his dad in case of an emergency."

  In his July 1 interview, Detective Steve Koopman asked Mohammad Shafia if there was any information he could release to the news media. Shafia asked for more time to notify family members, particularly Rona's people overseas.

  "I was thinking about that," he told the officer. "I want to contact Rona's brother in France." As for his own family, Shafia said he had contacted some of them, but only to say in a general way that an accident had occurred. "I have to advise them slowly that one person has passed away, two people have passed away, but if all of a sudden I say four people have passed away, anyone would go crazy."

  Many family members, however, did not wait to be contacted by Shafia about the deaths. Kingston Police had begun receiving disturbing information from friends and family of the Shafias living in Montreal and Europe. Their e-mail and phone calls insisted that there was much more to the case than originally thought.

  Calls to police came in from Hussain Hyderi, the Montreal man engaged to Zainab. Fahima Vorgetts, a distant relative of Rona living in the U.S. — and one of her closest telephone confidantes over the previous year — knew Rona had been threatened by Mohammad and Tooba. Fazil Javid, Tooba's brother living in Sweden, and Latif Hyderi, Tooba's uncle in Montreal — Hussain's father — reported telephone conversations with Mohammad in which he expressed anger and outrage at his daughter Zainab's "shameful" behaviour.

  "We are convinced this was a crime of honour, organized under the guidance of Mr. Shafia, his wife Tooba, and their oldest son, Hamed," wrote Rona's sister Diba Masoomi in a desperate e-mail from France.

  The day of the homicide upgrade (July 3), Inspector Brian Begbie delegated assignments to his investigative team. He put Scott in charge.

  As Kingston Police continued gathering evidence from the children's school and child-protection authorities, it would, indeed, point to this chilling motive — that the four murders were committed to regain family honour considered "lost" when the older girls developed relationships with young men.

  "The investigation doesn't stop," recalled Scott. "Now we had the events from the time the Nissan is purchased to the girls' deaths. We had that cold. Now we're getting a picture of the family prior to this and that helps [us] understand motive and mindset."

  Shame and honour…

  WHY did the friends and family of Mohammad Shafia conclude that the deaths of his three daughters
and Rona were the result of an honour killing? The answer to that question goes back a long way, in fact, to a time of pre-religious, pagan Arab tribalism that has long since been incorporated into the culture and is now well established in countries throughout the Middle East and Asia, including India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Jordan and Turkey, and the Balkans, among others.

  In many of the families from these cultures, the "honour" of the entire family reposes in the female members because they are the bearers of children and, therefore, carriers of the lineage. The notion of honour, however, is also a reflection of male status. The man who is shamed by the women in his family through their "inappropriate" behaviour must act to restore his honour, most often by killing the offending woman. Inappropriate behaviour can be anything from the manner of dress, association with friends and boyfriends outside of the family and social group, defiance and disobedience, adultery, and even rape, and need only be suspected by male family members to prompt action.

  Shame is a complex emotion that is connected to "face," and includes feelings of humiliation, embarrassment, and a sense of failure. Men in a patriarchal society such Afghanistan's identify strongly with one another and are socialized to see themselves as superior to women. While men move freely in society, women are constrained. A family's honour requires that a man control the women in his family and any shameful act by one of them reflects directly onto him. If he fails to act, he will, in effect, lose his sense of social dignity and will be deemed by other men as weak.

  The pressure on Mohammad Shafia and his son Hamed to restore the family's honour in the face of apparently shameful behaviour by some of the women in his family stemmed from a long and deeply embedded tradition, unquestioned by either of them.

  Rona's diary…

  THE information coming to police from family and friends of the Shafias revealed another shocking piece of information: Rona Amir Mohammad, the woman found dead in the back seat of the Nissan, was really Shafia's first wife. She was not merely a cousin or an aunt but Shafia and Tooba's partner in a polygamous marriage. Rona and Shafia had become husband and wife in an elaborate wedding ceremony in Kabul in 1978.

  The relationship was confirmed beyond any doubt on July 21 when police searched the Shafia home in Montreal. In a closet they found a diary Rona had kept for a short time in 2008. Handwritten in Persian, it described her deteriorating relations with Shafia and Tooba as well as her ostracism within the family.

  The memoir was like a voice from the grave. It painted a bleak picture of Rona's life in the Shafia household. She talked about going on endless walks around the Montreal neighbourhood to fill her days and escape abuse and about how she was being isolated from the children she had helped raise. Known to the world as her husband's cousin in order to hide their polygamous marriage, Rona's temporary immigration visa was firmly under Tooba's control. Rona, by her own account, was a woman without social standing, friends, or citizenship.

  Rue Bonnivet neighbour Mary-Ann Devantro recalled one of the times several of the Shafia girls and Rona came to visit at her apartment. Believing Rona was, in fact, the children's aunt, Devantro asked why such a beautiful woman wasn't married. Maybe she would be some day, Rona replied wistfully, not daring to reveal the truth.

  When Devantro commented on the delicately braided metal earrings Rona was wearing, Rona took them off and gave them to Devantro as a spontaneous gift. Today, they are Devantro's unhappy reminder of the beautiful woman with dark hair and sad eyes who suffered much and who, as it turned out, had ample reason to fear for her life.

  The first entry in Rona's diary began with the Islamic incantation, "In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful." Rona immediately launched into recollections of her early life in Kabul, about starting school at the age of five, and remembering her father, a retired Afghanistan army colonel. Rona had eight siblings — three step-sisters and two step-brothers from her father's first wife; and three sisters and a brother from the marriage between her father and her mother.

  "We were a middle-class family. I had just finished 11th grade when my brother Noor married. Shirin Jan, who was a distant relative on my father's side, had come to my brother's wedding reception and saw me sitting there, quiet and subdued. She liked me and asked for my hand in marriage for her son from her first husband," Rona recalls.

  That son was Mohammad Shafia, at the time a successful businessman growing his electronics sales and repair business in Kabul. Shirin Jan would visit Rona's home several times to get to know her prospective daughter-in-law. Rona definitely met with her approval. Then Shirin Jan invited the girl and her family to her home, Rona writes, "so that her son could have a good look at me. After our visit, her son announced his consent, so [they] stepped up the khwastgari." This is the ritual undertaken by the groom's family for completing an arranged marriage.

  "I knew nothing about such things," Rona writes, revealingly, "so when my elder brother came to ask me whether I accepted the union, I said, 'Give me away in marriage if he is a good man; don't if he is not.'"

  The family checked Shafia out, reporting that he was, indeed, "a good man but not educated," his schooling cut short with his father's death. The engagement would go on for two years, until Shafia and Rona were married in 1978 in Kabul's most opulent hotel, the Intercontinental, with a grand feast and celebration.

  "After getting married, my lot in life began a downward spiral, right up to today [while] I am writing these memoirs," Rona writes in her diary.

  Rona was unable to bear children. This was devastating news for the couple so they spent the next seven years travelling back and forth to India for fertility treatments. These were unsuccessful and, as a result, the relationship deteriorated.

  "Finally, my husband started picking on me. He wouldn't allow me [to] go to visit my mother, and at home he would find fault with my cooking and serving meals, and he would find excuses to harass me," Rona recounts. "I had to say, 'Go and take another wife, what can I do?'"

  Rona offered to share her home with another wife so that Shafia could have children. He accepted this and insisted he would continue to pay for fertility treatments. Then she learned that Shafia had been quietly making arrangements with Tooba's brother-in-law for a second marriage.

  The second wedding was also held at the Intercontinental. The photos of the day are unusual by Western standards: Mohammad, serious-looking in a dark suit, his hair and moustache thick and black, is flanked by his first wife on his left arm, and his new bride, Tooba, resplendent in a white gown, on his right. They look stiff and awkward on what should have been a day of celebration.

  Just three months after this second marriage, Tooba discovered she was pregnant. They travelled to India where Zainab was born on September 9, 1989. Rona was treated once more for her infertility, but the doctor this time said Rona would need surgery to assist with pregnancy. But the family had to return to Afghanistan so the procedure was never performed. Just over a year after Zainab's birth, Hamed was born, on December 31, 1990, and Rona's importance in the household began to rapidly diminish.

  Her position was further weakened by an unfortunate incident that took place shortly after Hamed was born. The family was lounging on the rooftop of their home. Rona was holding baby Hamed when she stood up and tripped. Both Rona and Hamed were injured, the baby requiring hospital treatment, some of it provided by Mohammad's brother, a doctor and medical professor in Kabul. Mohammad was livid, though Rona protested that it was an accident and she had been hurt, too.

  "I suffered so much until his son got well again that I could not even think about my own condition," Rona writes. "[My husband] did not treat me and my family decently until Hamed was well again."

  By this time, Tooba was pregnant with her third child, Sahar. Despite Rona's bleak descriptions of her life in the polygamous arrangement, there was one bright spot. Out of the blue, Tooba offered to give the baby she was carrying to Rona to raise as her own. This is a custom in some Afghan households where one wife i
s unable to have children. Rona was delighted and took over the care of Sahar when the baby was just 40 days old.

  They would be together 17 years later in the back seat of the Nissan Sentra at the bottom of the Rideau Canal — inseparable victims of a horrible crime.

  Nomadic life…

  IN 1992, the Shafias fled Afghanistan and the conservative mujahideen regime that had taken Kabul during the civil war. With their three children and Rona in tow, Mohammad and Tooba crossed the border into Pakistan. They would stay there for the next four years.

  According to Mohammad, he never felt his family was safe in Pakistan because of Pakistani support for the Taliban. By 1995, a repressive Taliban regime was in power in Kabul, and "liberal" people like his Afghan family were easy targets for persecution. Children were being kidnapped and held for ransom. Shafia was a wealthy man and had reason to fear such a thing.

  They moved to Dubai in 1996, where Shafia's electronics business flourished. He became the top Panasonics dealer in the country, one time receiving a $50,000 bonus from the parent corporation. Shafia still held property and stocks in Afghanistan and the family remained prosperous — so much so that in 2008, after he had been in Canada for a year, he sold one of his two houses in Kabul for $900,000.

  In 2000, he decided to try his fortune in New Zealand. The Shafias applied for visas but Rona's didn't clear for medical reasons. At the prompting of one of Shafia's business associates, they applied instead to Australia and were successful. What happened in Australia and why the Shafias left after a year is the subject of conflicting stories. Rona claims in her diary that the Australian government declared Shafia undesirable — that he hadn't created any wealth for Australians, only for himself, and that he disregarded the rules of his visa by purchasing property. At his trial, Shafia contended he was out of the country for much of the time on business trips and that Tooba was feeling isolated and alone in Australia. It was Tooba, he insisted, who pressed him to return to Dubai.