Toronto mother’s throat slit for letting children adopt Canadian culture, court hears in alleged honour killing trial

National Post

Joe O'Connor | Oct 10, 2012 9:39 PM ET | Last Updated: Oct 11, 2012 10:12 AM ET
More from Joe O'Connor | @oconnorwrites

ALEX TAVSHUNSKY FOR NATIONAL POST Peer Khairi in a Toronto court on Wednesday. He is accused of killing his wife Randjida Khairi, by slitting her throat, for allegedly standing up to him and letting their children live as Westerners.

 

Randjida Khairi was stabbed five times in her chest and back. She had her throat cut, a wound so ugly and deep that it sliced through her neck muscles, voicebox and windpipe — stopping only at her spine.

She was stabbed with two different knives. She drowned in her own blood; a process a pathologist would later determine took between five and 10 minutes. Police discovered Ms. Khairi’s body lying on a bloody cot in her family home, a 16th floor apartment in the northwest corner of Toronto, otherwise all tidy and neat, with a kitchen full of pots.

The victim was the mother of six. The victim was married to her killer for 30 years.

On Wednesday, Peer Khairi, a silver-haired man and an Afghan immigrant, sat in the defendant’s box of a downtown Toronto courtroom following the proceedings through a Dari interpreter, fingering a parade of gruesome crime scene photographs of his dead wife, taken by police on March 18, 2008, and presented to the court as evidence.

The 65-year-old jabbed at some photos with his index finger, and turned others this way and that, uttering a few words to his lawyer, rubbing his chin with his hand. Mostly he sat with his legs crossed, tracing his left thumb across his fingertips.

On the opposite side of the courtroom sat a 12-person jury consisting of four women and eight men. They represented a tapestry of ethnicities — of Canadians. Old and young, brown and white and black and all hues in between, contemplating the same images as the defendant while sitting in judgment of a case that marks the latest chapter in Canada’s ever-expanding book of alleged honour killing trials.

Mr. Khairi doesn’t dispute that he killed his wife. On that the Crown and the defence agree. At issue is how, precisely, her death occurred and what was going through her husband’s mind when he killed her. The accused has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder.

The Crown has told the court that, as a new arrival to this country, Mr. Khairi struggled with Canadian ways, often fighting with his wife over how she allowed their children to dress, to become more Western — to drift from the “culture and the rules of their birth place.”

That place is Afghanistan, a patriarchal society where women, be they wives or teenagers or young girls, disobey their husbands, any man, really, at their own peril. This is not an over-simplification. This is a tragic fact.

“These photographs are going to be very shocking to you,” Justice Robert Clark warned jurors before the crime scene images made the rounds. “You may find them somewhat upsetting…”

He continued, saying how the photographs of the victim with her throat cut wide might make the jurors angry, but that they should try to consider them calmly and in conjunction with the rest of the evidence presented.

Ms. Khairi, the court was told, had been thinking of leaving her husband. She spoke to other people, complete strangers in some cases, about her plans. Mr. Khairi told police upon his arrest that he felt disrespected, wronged by his children and betrayed by a wife who had turned against him. Now she is dead.

The trial resumes Thursday.