Ontario honour killing trial goes to jury next week

Agent 3 reports from Kingston that the trial of Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya (one of his wives), and their 21-year-old son Hamed, is set to go to an Ontario Superior Court jury next week. The trio are accused of murdering Shafia's other wife and three of his and Yahya's daughter in what the Crown calls an "honour killing", provoked by the daughters' behaving like normal Western teens rather than good Muslim girls.

Before Christmas, Shafia told the court he never saw the pix of his nearly-naked daughters until "after". And when he called them whores, said he'd cut them into pieces if they were still alive, and said "May the devil shit on their graves!", he was just expressing his frustration in a traditional Afghan manner.

After the holiday break, Tooba also testified in her own behalf. She wasn't sure what happened that fateful night because, errr, she wasn't there. She was really in a motel room some miles distant. And she just told the police she was there to protect her son. Putting it all on the kid, in Agent 3's opinion.

Tooba also said she had never heard of honour killings until now, and that her husband was a kind and good father -- certainly not a murderer -- who only became enraged when shown the dirty pictures. And where were these pix? In an album that Tooba had packed in a suitcase, to keep them as remembrances of her children...or something.

Those were the defence's star witnesses. Later the court heard from a string of relatives all of whom testified that they too had never heard of the concept of honour killings, the Shafia family were good people, they would never have done this kind of thing, yada yada yada. The fact that the witnesses live overseas and hadn't seen Shafia or Yahya in years was probably not lost on the jury.

The last defence witness, who appeared yesterday, was an anthropologist and former journalist, Nabi Misdaq, who offered expertise on Afghan culture and use of language in that society. He was asked how expletives are used in Afghanistan, which Shafia left 17 years ago.

Misdaq said curse words are "very common" among Afghan men and are used when they are "faced with something he thinks (had) nothing to do with him or was not his fault." The words don't mean that the speaker will act on them, said the witness. "They are not to be taken literally."

Police wiretaps, captured after the deaths occurred, record an audibly angry Shafia calling his dead daughters names like "whore" and "treacherous", comparing them to prostitutes, and willing the devil to "shit on their graves".

The witness was asked if "devil shit on their graves" is comparable to an expression in North American English. Misdaq answered, "The nearest would be, 'To hell with them' or 'To hell with it.'" Seems like a lot of feeling gets lost in translation.

Misdaq was the last defence witness. Agent 3 finds it significant that the son, Hamed Shafia, did not take the stand to explain and defend himself. The fix is in, our learned friend says. The kid's going to take the fall and hope the jury lets the parents out. After all, even if the boy does the full 25 years -- the most he can get under the Canadian Criminal Code -- he'll only be 46 when he gets out. Still lots of time to get married and have daughters of his own.