All 3 guilty in Shafia murder trial.Judge condems twisted concept of honor killings.(Yahoo).KINGSTON, Ont. - Three members of an Afghanistan-born Montreal family have been found guilty of killing three daughters and a co-wife in what the judge describes as "cold-blooded, shameful murders" resulting from a "twisted concept of honour."
A jury took 15 hours to find Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in a case so shocking it has riveted Canadians from coast to coast.
Even after the verdict was read, the three denied killing sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, Shafia as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, their father's childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.
Their bodies were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ont., in a multiple murder the Crown asserted was to avenge the family's outrage because the girls sought teenage freedoms agianst the will of their controlling father and brother.
As the verdicts were being read, Hamed put his head in his hands and hunched over while standing.Soon, his mother Tooba started to cry.When the judge asked if they each wanted to say anything, they one by one declared their innocence.
"We are not criminal, we are not murderer, we didn't commit the murder and this is unjust," Mohammad said through a translater.
His wife, Tooba, responded: "Your honourable justice, this is not just. I am not a murderer, and I am a mother, a mother."
Their son said in English: "Sir, I did not drown my sisters anywhere."
But the judge was unmoved, and spoke directly to the cultural cloud that has hung over the case since it began."You have each been convicted of the planned and deliberate murder of four members of your family...(A verdict) clearly supported by the evidence presented at this trial," said Judge Robert Maranger."It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime...the apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour...that has absolutely no place in any civilized society."
Throughout the judge's statement, Hamed put his head in his hands, while at one point both his mother and father rubbed his back to console him.
By the time Shafia, Yahya and Hamed were arrested on July 22, 2009, the case against them included intercepted conversations secretly recorded by police.
Comments mostly made by Shafia on those wiretaps provided the foundation for the Crown's "honour killing" theory.
"I say to myself, 'Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again,'" Shafia says on one. "That is how hurt I am. Tooba, they betrayed us immensely. They violated us immensely. There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this."
"Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows...nothing is more dear to me than my honour," Shafia.First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Justice Minister Rob Nicholson called honor killings “barbaric and unacceptable in Canada” in a statement issued after the court handed down its verdict.
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