TORONTO — On a summer morning in 2009, in canal locks east of Toronto, police made a grisly discovery: In a submerged Nissan car were the bodies of three teenage sisters and a 52-year-old woman.
A joyride gone tragically wrong, claimed the father, Mohammad Shafia, 58, who reported the disappearance. An "honor killing," prosecutors allege. A murder trial is under way, heating up a national debate in Canada about how to better absorb immigrants into the cultural mainstream.
The United Nations reports 5,000 females a year are victims of honor killings around the world, including the U.S. where in February an Iraqi immigrant was convicted of second-degree murder for running over and killing his daughter in a suburban Phoenix parking lot because he believed she had become too Westernized.
In Britain, judges ruled on Dec 21. that a baby born to a Muslim couple having an affair had to be adopted to save it from being murdered by its mother’s family in a so-called honor killing, the Daily Telegraph reported.
In the Toronto trial, the prosecution accuses Afghan-born Shafia, his wife, and their 20-year-old son of killing the daughters because they dishonored the family by defying its disciplinarian rules on dress, dating, socializing and going online.
The older victim was Shafia's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, who was living with him and his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, in Montreal. It was a polygamous relationship, the court has been told, and if revealed, could have resulted in their deportation.
The parents and son, Hamed, have pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder.
The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children. The second marriage produced seven children.
The months leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, the court has heard. Zainab, the oldest at 19, 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.
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