Family Fatality

In the ongoing trial of three members of an Afghan-Canadian family accused by Crown prosecutors of the deliberate, planned murder of the three teen-age daughters of the family, evidence presented in court ties a noose of criminal responsibility ever tighter around Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their oldest son Hamed.

When Mohammad's first wife Rona Mohammad Amir, daughters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 were discovered submerged in a newly-purchased family vehicle at the Kingston locks, the story the three told, the father, mother and son, was one of baffled innocence. Their story simply did not hold together; the mucilage of lies was too apparent.

And this appears to be the reason that police were given the all-clear to install listening devices in their remaining family vehicle. Which gave police access to conversations that ensued between the husband, wife and son in Dari, later translated, which unequivocally led to their guilt. A Dari-speaking police officer, interviewing the mother had also revealed too many inconsistencies.

It is the nature of the conversations that took place between the three who conspired to murder their own family members that is so compellingly chilling. That a mother's love for her daughters could be so horribly compromised through a cultural notion of 'honour' as to compel her to agree with her husband's decision to kill her children is beyond belief.

"I know Zainab was already done, but I wish two others weren't."
"No, Tooba, they were treacherous. They were treacherous. They betrayed both themselves and us. Like this woman standing on the side of the road and if you stop the car, she would go with you anywhere.
"It isn't harder than watching them every hour with lunda (Dari for lover). For that reason whenever I see those pictures (the girls had taken of themselves wearing underwear) I am consoled. I say to myself, 'You did well.' Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again.
"We subjected ourselves to hardships. We took on drudgery for them, we (used to) wash their shit and pee ... after all should this have happened? No one does this... The only thing we inhibited them from was lundabazi (Dari for promiscuity), that was the only wrong we did them."

That a son's sense of right and wrong might be so miserably contorted as to persuade him that it represented a duty to family and to their culture and their religion to erase the girls, his sisters, from life to assuage his father's remorseless hatred for his own because they were not obedient, is beyond belief.

That the three girls - who lived as virtual prisoners in their own home which had become a gated prison that kept them from the comfort of being ordinary Canadian teens going about doing the things that ordinary Canadian girls do as is their human right - were desperate to somehow leave the confines of their home-cum-prison and relayed their wishes but no one listened, is beyond tragic.