The Mother is the Last to Know

The Shafia murder trial in Kingston, Ontario has been going on for a number of weeks. Mohammad Shafia, his son Hamed, and one of Mr. Shafia’s wives, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, are accused of murdering the couple’s three daughters and Mr. Shafia’s other wife by drowning them in a canal.

Yesterday Ms. Yahya took the stand, and denied knowing anything about the crime. She even said she had never heard of the term “honor killing” before.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video of a CBC report on the Shafia trial. As Vlad notes:

This is surreal in its magnitude and transparency. I guess the only good thing one can say about the Shafia family is that they seem to be crappy liars, although not unpracticed ones, perhaps.

The fact that they claim that a Canadian police department would torture their son if they didn’t falsely confess to a murder is a horrific sort of lie, because it would mean that we have police forces that act likes ones in Islamic nations. And we most certainly do not.

Add to that the easily discovered lie that they never saw the pictures until after the murders, when all the while there is video of the father showing off the photo album before they happened.

Note: this perps in this case have a Mohammed Coefficient of 66.67%.

Below are some excerpts from a Daily Mail article about the trial:

A mother accused of murdering three of her daughters and her husband’s first wife in an honour killing broke down in tears while testifying today in an Ontario court.

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, is accused of conspiring with her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their eldest son, Hamed, 21, of running one of their family cars into a canal with their four relatives inside.

Prosecutors say that they did so in order to protect their family’s honour because the four women were acting disobediently by having boyfriends, wearing skimpy clothes, and not listening to their strict Muslim father.

Shafia was polygamous, and lived with both his first wife Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, and his second wife, Yahya, in their home in Canada.

Rona was infertile, Shafia was allowed to take a second wife without divorcing his first, which was in accordance to Islamic law.

Now, a Canadian court is judging whether or not Shafia, Yahya and Hamed acted together to kill their family members in an effort to restore honour to their family name, or if Rona, Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, all died in a tragic car accident as the accused claim.

When the car was found in the canal on June 30, 2009, there was no one in the driver’s seat and three of them had bruising to the back of their heads.

The trial resumed Monday after being paused in December. Mohamma Yahya took the stand, and while she was never asked directly about the death of her relatives, she used her time to rebut the view of their household as a harsh one.

She said that her husband only hit the children once and used to badger them verbally if they were bad, not beat them.

‘He used to go on and continuously; he was just swearing at them and continuously talking about that for weeks,’ she said at the trial.

Other witnesses disagree, saying that their eldest daughter, Zainab, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend, and she fled to a shelter, terrified of her father, the court was told.

Hat tip for the article: Gaia.