Canadian Family Convicted Of Murder

ralphrepo · Jan 30, 2012

If any of you have been following this riveting case...

Video from Youtube: [video=youtube;Hx0CTwMLT8w]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx0CTwMLT8w[/video]

...it seems that the jury had ruled on it and convicted all three family members of first degree murder. From the New York Times yesterday:

January 29, 2012
Afghan Family, Led by Father Who Called Girls a Disgrace, Is Guilty of Murder
By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — It began with a puzzling and grisly discovery in 2009: a car submerged in a 19th-century canal lock with the bodies of three teenage girls and a middle-aged woman inside. On Sunday, the father, the mother and a brother of the girls were each convicted of four counts of first-degree murder. The verdict concluded a complex, three-month trial in which prosecutors described the crimes as “honor killings.” The defendants — Mohammad Shafia, 58; Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21 — and the victims belonged to a family of Afghans who had moved to Canada two years before the crime, in June 2007, under a program for affluent immigrants. Both the woman in the car, Rona Amir Mohammad, and Ms. Yahya were married to Mr. Shafia.

During the investigation of the deaths, police wiretaps recorded Mr. Shafia repeatedly expressing the view, often in graphic, vulgar language, that the girls had disgraced his family by dating and by wearing revealing clothing. Other evidence showed that at least one of the dead girls was so frightened of her father that she sought help from the police to escape the household and be placed in foster care with her sisters, without success. Mr. Shafia’s solution, prosecutors said, was to murder three of his seven children and Ms. Amir Mohammad, and to try, improbably, to make it look like an auto accident; they presented evidence that the car in the canal, a Nissan Sentra, was pushed there using the family’s Lexus, and that someone in the household had searched the Internet for advice on how to conduct a murder.

The jury delivered its verdict after 15 hours of deliberation. Afterward, Justice Robert L. Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice raised the cultural issues surrounding the case, which, while rarely mentioned directly in court, had become a widespread topic of discussion in Canada, particularly in Quebec, where the family lives. “It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous, more despicable, more honorless crime,” the judge told the defendants in a courtroom in Kingston, Ontario. “The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women.” All three defendants said they were innocent. Ms. Yahya said in court after the verdict: “I am not a murderer and I am a mother — a mother!” Her lawyer, Andrew Crowe, said she would appeal. Under Canadian law, first-degree murder carries a compulsory sentence of life in prison, with no chance of parole for the first 25 years. A Parks Canada employee spotted the Sentra in the Rideau Canal when he arrived for work at a lock station near Kingston in June 2009. Inside were Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, ages 19, 17 and 13, and Ms. Amir Mohammad, 53, who entered Canada claiming to be Mr. Shafia’s cousin when in fact she was his other wife.

The family stopped in Kingston on the way back to their home in Montreal after a brief holiday trip to Niagara Falls; they bought the Sentra secondhand the day before the trip. Mr. Shafia and Ms. Yahya told police and reporters that Ms. Amir Mohammad and the girls had taken the car on a late-night joy ride organized by Zainab, who did not have a driver’s license. But the police were immediately suspicious. Evidence presented at trial did not establish exactly how the woman and three girls died. But there were indications that the four victims were already dead when the car went into the canal. The prosecution built part of its case on conflicting statements and missteps by the defendants — they booked accommodations for only six people in Kingston, even though the family numbered 10 before the killings — but the most compelling evidence came from police wiretaps.

“I say to myself, ‘Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again,’ ”

Mr. Shafia said about his daughters on one recording. “They violated us immensely. There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this.” Defense lawyers argued that the remarks were prompted by the discovery days after the deaths of a photo album showing the girls with boys, although the family displayed what appeared to be the same album to television crews shortly after the deaths. A diary kept by Ms. Amir Mohammad, who apparently could not bear children, indicated that Ms. Yahya treated her as a servant, and described beatings by Mr. Shafia and by his son Hamed when Mr. Shafia was away on business trips. Evidence at trial suggested that he was also brutal to the girls and feared by them.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/w...mily-members-convicted-in-honor-killings.html
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In a related article about the case's effect on local Muslims:

Local Muslims express mixed emotions following Shafia convictions

All I can say is, that sometimes you can get the boy out the ghetto, but you can't get the ghetto out the boy. This seems to be a real problem also in places like Europe, who are finding that large infusions of backward, religiously orthodox immigrants of various faiths, have begun to skew their social precepts of how life should be lived. Personally, I think that western nations need to look not just at how people are persecuted in their foreign home, but also in their ability, propensity or probability to persecute others once they arrive; that is, these are just the sort of extremist immigrants that North America doesn't need. If people are going to come to North America and participate in Jihad, or practice ultra orthodox versions of Sharia or other extremist customs (like this family did), then it would be better not to have allowed them in to begin with.

Comments?

ThatGuy · Jan 30, 2012

Excellent, Canada may be a multicultural society, but it has no place for such things.

ralphrepo · Jan 30, 2012

ThatGuy said: ↑

Excellent, Canada may be a multicultural society, but it has no place for such things.
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In a related story that shows how some cultural groups value women:

Asia
30 January 2012 Last updated at 07:13 ET
Afghan woman is killed 'for giving birth to a girl'
By Bilal Sarwary,
BBC News, Kabul

A woman in north-eastern Afghanistan has been arrested for allegedly strangling her daughter-in-law for giving birth to a third daughter. The murdered woman's husband, a member of a local militia, is also suspected of involvement but he has since fled. The murder took place two days ago in Kunduz province. The baby girl, who is now two months old, was not hurt. The birth of a boy is usually a cause for celebration in Afghanistan but girls are generally seen as a burden. Some women in Afghanistan are abused if they fail to give birth to boys. And this is just the latest in a series of high-profile crimes against women in the country. Late last year a horrifying video emerged of the injuries suffered by a 15-year-old child bride who was locked up and tortured by her husband.

'Crime against humanity'

This murder took place in the village of Mahfalay, in the district of Khanabad in Kunduz. Khanabad's police chief, Sufi Habib, told the BBC that "the mother gave birth to a third girl two months ago. The husband and mother-in-law strangled her for giving birth to a third daughter". Senior officials told the BBC that the mother-in-law, known as Wali Hazrata, tied the feet of the 22-year old woman, who was known as Stori, while Stori's husband strangled her. He is thought to be a fighter with an illegal armed militia which is is believed to have some political support. Local villagers say that Stori often urged her husband to lay down his arms. "She lived in a hell not a house. But then she also asked her husband to stay home and avoid going out with these thugs," one neighbour who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC. While militia groups have some political support, they have often been accused of violence against women, robberies and extortion. Afghan women's rights activists brought this case to the attention of the media. The Director for Kunduz Women's affairs, Nadira Gya, condemned the incident saying: "it was a brutal crime committed against an innocent woman". Local religious and tribal elders in the district also condemned the killing, saying it was an act of ignorance, and calling it a crime against Islam, humanity and women. They called for immediate punishment. Wali Hazrata appears to have made no public comment as yet.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16787534

Also noteworthy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11530849
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turbobenx · Jan 30, 2012

this is horrific....

ThatGuy · Jan 30, 2012

Typically I'm against the world police sort of thing, but i just feel so terrible when i hear about things like this.

ralphrepo · Jan 30, 2012

Here's a pointed opinion update by CNN, on what Islamic religious authorities say about this:

January 30th, 2012, 01:30 PM ET
Islam doesn't justify 'honor murders,' experts insist
By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

(CNN) - Zainab Shafia's crime was to run off to marry a man her parents hated. Middle sister Sahar's crime was to wear revealing clothes and have secret boyfriends. Youngest sister Geeti's crime was to do badly in school and call social workers for help dealing with a family home in turmoil. The punishment for all three teenage Canadian sisters was the same: death. Their executioner: their brother, acting on instructions from the father to run their car off the road. Another family member, their father's first wife in a polygamous marriage, was also killed. Hamed Shafia, his father, Mohammed, and his mother, Tooba Mohammed Yahya, were sentenced to life in prison for murder, with Judge Robert Maranger excoriating their "twisted notion of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."

Leading Muslim thinkers wholeheartedly endorsed the Canadian judge's verdict, insisting that "honor murders" had no place and no support in Islam. "There is nothing in the Quran that justifies honor killings. There is nothing that says you should kill for the honor of the family," said Taj Hargey, director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford in England. "This idea that 'somehow a girl has besmirched our honor and therefore the thing to do is kill her' is bizarre, and Muslims should stop using this defense," he said, arguing that the practice is cultural, not religious in origin. "You cannot say this is what Islam approves of. You can say this is what their culture approves of," he said. The Shafia family is originally from Afghanistan.

Experts say honor murders take place in many parts of the world. "It's definitely a problem that happens in many different places: the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh and among immigrant communities in North America," said Nadya Khalife, a researcher on women's rights in the Arab world for Human Rights Watch. Several Arab countries and territories, including Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, have laws providing lesser sentences for honor murders than for other murders, Human Rights Watch says. Egypt and Jordan also have laws that have been interpreted to allow reduced sentences for honor crimes, the group says. Reliable figures of the number of honor murders are hard to come by, Khalife said, but she pointed to a United Nations Population Fund estimate of 5,000 per year. Khalife agreed that the practice should not be blamed on Islam. "It's not linked to religion; it's more cultural," she said. "There have been several Islamic scholars who have issued fatwas against honor killing." Mohammed Shafia, who denied murder, said himself in court that Islam did not justify honor murders. "In our religion, a person who kills his wife or daughter, there is nothing more dishonorable," he testified. But Shafia was heard condemning his dead children in wiretapped conversations played in court. "May the devil defecate on their graves! This is what a daughter should be? Would a daughter be such a whore?" he said.

Hargey, the director of the Muslim Educational Centre, said violence was sometimes the result of painful transition. "Muslims are in a state of flux," he said. "They are between two worlds: the ancient world and the new technological age," he said. "Women are getting rights and the ability to choose their own spouses. The family in Canada didn't know how to respond to this: the conflict between the discipline of children and the new reality." Irshad Manji, the author of "Allah, Liberty and Love: Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom," said there was another conflict at work in honor murders, a term CNN uses in preference to "honor killings" because the latter phrase does not properly describe the crime. It is "a tribal tradition that emphasizes the family or the tribe or the community over the individual," she said. Although the practice may not be Islamic, she said, not all Muslims understand the distinction. "It is a problem within Islam because of how Muslims often confuse culture and religion," she said. "It's Muslims who have to learn to separate culture and religion. If we don't, Islam will continue to get the bad name that it gets."

But one vocal British campaigner against honor violence points out that all the crimes are not perpetrated by Muslims. Jasvinder Sanghera, who was the victim of a forced marriage, is not Muslim; she is Sikh. "Significant cases are happening within South Asian communities, be it Pakistani, Indian, Sikh, Muslim, Kurdish, Iranian, Middle Eastern communities," she said. "And we have to recognize that because the statistics don't lie. I am not standing here trying to embarrass those communities. But equally, those communities should be ashamed because this is happening in their community and they are not taking a stand," she said. On the other hand, honor murders are not a problem in Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim population. "No such a practice can be found among Indonesian Muslims," said Azyumardi Azra, the director of the graduate school at the State Islamic University in Jakarta, Indonesia.

" 'Honor killing' is, I believe, a cultural problem among Arab and South Asian Muslims. I don't think that kind of practice has an Islamic basis," he said. Although women and girls make up the overwhelming number of victims, there have been at least some male victims, including Ahmet Yildiz, a gay Turkish man whose fugitive father is the main suspect in his 2008 shooting death. Britain has had about a dozen honor murders per year for the past several years, said Ghayasuddin Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain. He, too, said the crimes were not justified by Islam. "This comes from tribal customs where the father - not both parents - see children as their property. A girl decides to marry somebody of whom their parents do not approve, and they conspire and find some way to kill and dispose of this body," he said. "This is a kind of misplaced shame that parents feel that their daughter has decided to marry somebody of her choosing, not theirs."

Britain's Crown Prosecution Service has an expert devoted to prosecuting honor-based violence, Nazir Afzal. Convicting perpetrators can be difficult, he said. "There is a wall of silence around this, and people are not prepared to talk," he said. But Afzal insisted that it was "absolutely important that you bring every single person to justice because you want to deter other people from doing it." And along with the Islamic scholars and human rights advocates, he rejected out of hand the idea that religion justified it. "At the end of the day, murder is murder. There is no faith on Earth, no community on Earth that justifies this," he said. "Abrahamic faiths say 'Thou shalt not kill,' " he pointed out. "At the end of the day, nobody should die for this."

Dan Gilgoff - CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

Source: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/...stify-honor-murders-experts-insist/?hpt=hp_c1
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Knoctur_nal · Jan 31, 2012

dusted. ur old outdated and ignorant ways will not be accepted.

MissCheekS · Jan 31, 2012

This is terrible, many of these kinda things happen over here... lotsa brothers who kill their own sisters etc.... crazy, how honor can be worth more than anything or anyone....

ralphrepo · Feb 1, 2012

MissCheekS said: ↑

This is terrible, many of these kinda things happen over here... lotsa brothers who kill their own sisters etc.... crazy, how honor can be worth more than anything or anyone....
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Frankly, this sort of eastern 'face' thing isn't all that new. It's just a matter of the interpretation. I guess for this one individual, the father, his command, control and demand of obedience from 'his' family as its patriarch, mattered more than the collective lives of a wife and daughters. Remember what happened in Raise the Red Lantern [1991], when the patriarch discovers wife three's infidelity? In essence, a lot of these cultural face things remain extant, especially in immigrant or international communities. They really have little place in the modern world as more often than not, they rely heavily on antiquated precepts of vassal ownership, bondage or subjugation; in effect, various forms of slavery.

Canadian Family Convicted Of Murder

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turbobenx .........

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Knoctur_nal |Force 10 from Navarone|

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