Hamed Mohammed Shafia is escorted by police officers into the Frontenac County courthouse in Kingston, Ontario on Wednesday, January 18, 2012.
Mr. Shafia captured in secret police wiretaps speaking to Ms. Yahya or Hamed:
“Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows...nothing is more dear to me than my honour.”
“Let's leave our destiny to God and may God never make me, you or your mother honourless. I don't accept this dishonour.”
“This is my word to you: Be I dead or alive, nothing in the world is above than your honour.”
“I am telling you now and I was telling you before that whoever play with my honour, my words are the same...There is no value of life without honour.”
“If we remain alive one night or one year, we have no tension in our hearts, [thinking that] our daughter is in the arms of this or that boy, in the arms of this or that man. God curse their generation. Curse of God on both of them, on their kind. God's curse on them for generations...May the devil [defecate] on their graves. Is that what a daughter should be? Would [a daughter] be such a whore?”
EXCERPT:
The morning the car was found, Const. Brent White arrived on scene around 10:30. He thought first of pranksters, because he looked at how the lock gate and a wooden beam formed a small triangle, with barely enough clearance for a vehicle to slip through into the water.
“I’m thinking, ‘This is pretty difficult to get that vehicle in that narrow spot,’” he testified. “It had to be driven there on purpose.”
Then divers went into the canal to scope out the underwater scene and found four bodies floating in the car. They would be identified as sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Amir Mohammad, 52.
The case became a sudden death investigation that fell under the coroner’s authority, and police officers began to collect information at the scene, including pieces of broken head light that would soon become the key to the whole case.
At the same time, a couple and their 18-year-old son showed up at the Kingston police station to report three daughters and a woman missing. The Shafia family from Montreal had been staying in Kingston for the night at a motel and when they woke up they discovered three teenage sisters and a woman described as their father’s cousin were missing, along with their car.
They said their eldest daughter Zainab had taken the car keys and must have taken the other three for a joy ride that somehow turned tragic.
While police were taking statements from Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya and their son Hamed — the police had found a Farsi interpreter to help with the parents’ interviews — the Nissan Sentra was being hoisted out of the canal, and some of what police found didn’t quite fit with the accident scenario.
The car’s ignition and lights were off and it was in first gear with the front seats reclined all the way back and the driver’s window open. The findings weren’t initially indicative of murder, but they were suspicious.
The angle of the seats would make it nearly impossible to drive, and it certainly wouldn’t have been comfortable. Even an inexperienced driver would know they should have the gear shift in D for drive. And all indications were the car fell into the water in the middle of the night. Why were the lights off?
As one of the divers pointed out, why did it appear as though nobody tried to escape through the open window?
The only logical possibility, the Crown would later argue at trial, is that the four victims were already dead, drowned first then put in the car to stage an accident.
In the family’s initial interviews with police they said they were on their way home from a vacation to Niagara Falls when they stopped in Kingston for the night. The family of 10 had been travelling in two cars: a Nissan Sentra and a Lexus SUV. The police found it odd though, that Shafia, Yahya and Hamed had driven to the police station in a Pontiac minivan.
Hamed said he had decided not to stay at the motel that night with his family and instead drove through the night back home to Montreal so he could get his laptop and conduct some business, meeting with retail tenants at the strip mall his father owned.
Kingston police called colleagues in Montreal to make some initial inquiries about the vehicles and were startled to find that Hamed had reported a collision between the Lexus SUV and a parking barrier in a near-empty lot that very morning in Montreal. He had asked the officer who took his collision report if the damage could be repaired immediately.
Hamed had neglected to mention these details in his interview when he talked about leaving to go to Montreal.
By the end of Day 1, police already had their suspicions, but they still had a long way to go to build a case against the family.
The next day Const. Steve Koopman got consent from Shafia to search the Lexus and pieces of broken Lexus head light, presumably from Hamed’s parking lot collision, were taken to be analyzed. Const. Rob Etherington was busy trying to reconstruct the head light with pieces from the Montreal collision, when he discovered what would be the turning point in the investigation.
Tiny pieces of plastic collected at the scene where the Nissan was found were the missing pieces of the Lexus head light. Only, according to the family’s story, the Lexus was never at the scene that night.
Investigators on the case were informed July 4 that it was now a homicide investigation.
http://www.1310news.com/news/national/article/325259—an-inside-look-into-the-shafia-case-police-tell-how-the-killers-were-caught