THE SHAFIA HONOR MURDERS   (part 2)                                             

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this three-part series, this is a very long article for you to read in these two parts but as you read it, you will be fascinated at how and why three members of a family murdered four of their own family members. I got the information from a past edition of Mcleans Magazine that had written a very large article about the murders. I have written my own version of the events with the Maclean`s article and other sources as a guide.

The murders

The four murders of the three girls and Rona, (the first wife of Shafia) were carried out by the girl’s father, his second wife, Tooba and their son, Hamid during a family road trip. The exact details remain unclear, but it seems as though the four women were incapacitated.  

The exact location where they were murdered remains a mystery, but somewhere at a secluded area,, the three women and child were held underwater, one by one, until they stopped moving. Three of them (all but Sahar) had bruises on the top of their heads, suggesting some kind of blow in those final moments. Dead, or at least unconscious, the bodies were piled back inside the Nissan, the front seats having been reclined.

The idea of the murderers was to stage a traffic accident that was to convince the cops that they were dealing with a tragic, late-night joyride. But as one of them drove the car to its final resting place, doubt in the murderer’s minds must have crept in. Just to reach the water’s edge, the Nissan had to jump a high curb, drive across some grass, make a hard left around a rock outcropping, then a quick right around a narrow wall. The police were obviously suspicious since the route looked nothing like it had been a split-second wrong turn.

Once in position, the driver left the engine running, got out, reached through the open driver’s side window, and moved the gear shift into first while assuming, on its own power, that the car would plunge over the concrete lip and into the water.

It didn’t happen that way. The front wheels went over the ledge, but nothing else. The car teetered in the night, tires spinning, engine running with the four bodies still inside. The plan was flawed from the beginning and to the murderers; they were now in a crisis mode.

One of the three reached through the driver’s side window and turned off the ignition. But the bigger problem remained, dangling in plain sight. They had only one choice: drive the Lexus behind the car, and ram the Nissan the rest of the way.

The evidence of the murders

The collision shattered the SUV’s left headlight, leaving bits of plastic scattered on the ground. Before speeding away, the killers scrambled to pick up each of the broken shards. They didn’t get them all.  The police found the rest of the plastic shards on the ground. The location of the shards placed the murderer’s car where the car began pushing the victim’s car into the water.

Hamed called the police that morning-from Montreal. At 7:55 a.m., just hours after the Nissan sank into the water.  He did this because he had to explain to the police why his car had a broken left headlight. He told them that he had a single-car fender-bender in an empty parking lot near their house. He told the responding cop that he accidentally smashed the left front end of the Lexus into a yellow utility pole.

This stupid young man was too ignorant to come up with a better explanation with respect to the broken left headlight. If he was telling the truth, there would be plastic shards at the yellow utility pole near his home and not at the crime scene.

At 8:30 in the morning, he phoned the Kingston East Motel and spoke to his father. Then he dialled Sahar’s cell, knowing full well it was submerged in the canal.  The call went straight to voice mail.  He phoned again. He did this in an intent to convince the police that he believed that she was still alive. By then, Hamed was behind the wheel of the family’s green Pontiac minivan, speeding back to Kingston to pick up his father and mother.

He was in such a rush to switch the cars and stage a bogus accident—he stupidly took everyone’s luggage, including his mother’s purse, with him to Montreal. Now since his mother was still in Kingston, why would he have taken his mother`s purse to Montreal? Professional killers don’t make blunders—amateurs do.

Back at the motel, Hamed and his parents initiated the next phase of their plan—the necessary missing persons report. They walked into the Kinston police headquarters just after 12 o’clock.

Why did they walk to the police headquarters? They had two cars and although one was in the canal, the other one Hamed had driven from Montreal was at the motel.

Meanwhile, at the locks, the police investigators were already combing the scene, alerted to the sunken sedan by a Parks Canada employee earlier that morning. It didn’t take long for police at the station to make the connection. Escorted into a private room, the trio was told what they already knew: their relatives were dead, discovered in a bizarre, watery grave.

The police interviews

At 3:45 p.m., Shafia sat down with Det.-Const. Dempster for his tape-recorded interview. Composed and coherent, he talked about his business interests overseas, the $2-million shopping mall in Laval, and Zainab’s pending engagement plans. “It wasn’t a hundred per cent,” he explained, his Dari answers translated by a Farsi interpreter (Farsi and Dari are essentially the same, like British English and American English). Shafia also mentioned, without being asked, that his kids liked to take a  “turn on the car and take it away.”

That must have appeared to the detective as a strange sudden switch in the conversation. Shafia was obviously trying to convince the detective that his daughters must have taken the car from the motel the previous night. That doesn’t explain why his ex-wife was missing and in the car with his daughters that sank in the canal.

Because Sahar spent so much of the journey rifling off text messages, investigators were able to retrace the family’s precise route, minute by minute, cell tower by cell tower. The route the caravan was taking led them directly from Montreal to the canal. 

As investigators discovered the real route that the fatal car took, the detective got even more suspicious.

Shafia not realizing that the detective was suspicious at what Shafia was telling him, he said they stopped in Kingston early that morning because his wife, Tooba who was driving the Nissan, was feeling “dizzy” and needed to sleep. So she waited-with his daughters and his first wife while he and Hamed went searching for a place to sleep.

Shafia said, “When the Nissan rejoined us at the motel, Hamed left for Montreal to work on the building or something and everyone else went to bed. And that’s when Zainab and Sahar asked for the keys to retrieve some clothes from the trunk.”

The detective’s questioning was gentle but pressing however he  kept returning to a portion of the story that, two and a half years  later was a key sticking point at trial. Where did Tooba wait while Shafia was driving the Lexus while he looked for the motel? And how did Tooba know where to meet them afterwards?

The truth, of course, is that the Nissan was at the locks parking lot and never made it to the motel since it was then pushed into the canal.  But in order for Shafia to sell his dubious story that Zainab, with no licence and no permission, took the car for a deadly spin with her sisters and Rona he couldn’t tell the detective that it must have gone to the canal. If he had done that, the next question would be, “Where you at the canal when the Nissan was sinking in the canal?”

So when Dempster asked the obvious question (where did Tooba wait for the Lexus driven by Shafia) He couldn’t tell the detective  the truth because it was at the precise spot where the Nissan and his daughters and first wife Rona were pushed into the canal.

“How did your wife know which hotel to go to?” Dempster asked.

“You know, the distance was little,” Shafia replied.

Still puzzled, Dempster asked another obvious question. “What do you think happened, Mohammad?” (Shafia’s first name)

“I just woke up in the morning and didn’t see them, that’s it,” he answered. “I don’t know anything else.”

“You know the car, your car, the Nissan, was found underwater,” he continued.

“You said it,” Shafia answered.

“Any thoughts, any idea, how it got there?”

“No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “Because this is the first time such an incident has befallen me.” As he left the interview room, Shafia checked his watch.

Shafia’s son, Hamed didn’t need the interpreter. Fluent in English and Dari, he looked like any other 18-year-old Canadian, with Air Jordan warm-up pants and a mop of curly black hair. When Dempster asked if he wanted some tea or coffee, he replied: “Oh no, it’s all good.”

Dempster asked Hamed the same question he asked his dad: “Where did Tooba wait with the Nissan?”

Hamed replied, “I think it was at a McDonald’s or something,” He said. “I’m not sure.”

Once they reached the motel, Hamed said he plopped on a bed for a few minutes, just long enough to hear Zainab ask for the keys to the Nissan. Then he got into the Lexus and left for Montreal.

Why Montreal? Hamed’s reasons ranged from “something personal” to “I forgot my laptop” to sometimes “you don’t feel like staying at one place with your parents, ya know?” Each new response only made Dempster that much more suspicious.

The detective must have wondered why the two suspects offered two different explanations as to why Hamed drove back  to Montreal.

Hamed  didn’t want to admit that his real purpose was to smash the left headlight in Montreal so that the car wouldn’t be connected with the Nissan being shoved into the canal.

The detective asked point blank, “Hamed, do you know what happened to your sisters?”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

Still doubtful, Dempster told Hamed about an eyewitness (an eight-year-old boy, as it turned out) who had just spoken to an investigator on the scene. According to his story, there were two cars at the water’s edge, but only one—the bigger one-drove away. It was the Lexus.

“You mean someone pushed them in?” Hamed asked.

Oh Oh. That was a stupid answer. Up until that point, Dempster had never suggested such a scenario.

“Hamed, I think you know more than what you’ve told me here today.”

“I have no idea,” Hamed answered. “You mean someone must have, uh, uh, together? Must have come together with them?”

 The detective had just heard the voice of a drowning man trying to grasp a straw floating on the surface of the water and just out of his reach.

“I’m not saying that a person caused it to happen,” Dempster said. “I’m not saying they did it on purpose, but there is somebody out there that knows what really happened and we need that person to speak up.” Hamed wasn’t going to admit that he was that person.

Hamed said he was “shocked” by the suggestion. “If I would have witnessed something, I would be the first person to tell my mom and dad,” he insisted. “How would I feel inside?”

Dempster made it clear he wasn’t accusing anyone of anything. But just to be sure, he said the Montreal police were going to swing by the house and take a peek at the Lexus.

When Tooba took her turn in the interview room, Dempster got right to the point. “What I am trying to understand and I think what everyone wants to know, is how the car got from the motel to the water.”

“”Can I say (what happened)? “ she replied.

“Yes, please.”

Tooba said she was the one who drove the Nissan into Kingston, but was too “tired” and “nauseous” to go any further. She parked (somewhere) and waited for the others to find a place to sleep. “When they got the motel, they wanted, to come to get me but I came myself. I was changing for bed, around 2 a.m., when Zainab walked in and asked for the keys. I don’t understand what happened after that.”

With Tooba’s three daughters dead, her life supposedly destroyed, she told her story to the detective as if only the car was lost. No tears. No emotion. But she did make sure to point out that her eldest daughter was in a “hurry” to get back to Montreal. Tooba even claimed that Zainab didn’t have a licence, let alone highway experience and yet was begging to drive during the trip back from Niagara Falls. “She would do whatever she wanted to do,” Tooba said. “I think she thought: ‘My mom and dad are asleep, let’s go for a drive and return.’ “

“Were you there when the car went in the water?” Dempster asked, a few minutes later.

“No, no, I wasn’t there,” she said.

The detective then said, “If you were not there, my job is to find out what happened, and tell you,” he continued. “As a parent, one parent to another, if something happened to my child, I would want to know the truth.”

Tooba nodded in agreement. “I would have told you everything, but I haven’t seen anything,” she said. “If I knew I would have told you, and you could have helped me.”

Dempster leaned in closer. “People have not been truthful with us today.”

At 8:40 p.m., the sun setting over the crime scene, Hamed was back in the interview room, arms folded. As promised, an investigator had contacted the Montreal police and Dempster now knew about the single-car smash-up that morning. He asked, “Why are you hiding that information from me, Hamed?”

His answer was immediate: “If I would tell you, you would go tell my dad.”

Hamed said he was on his way to grab some breakfast when he accidentally smacked a pole, and just didn’t want his father to find out until after everyone got home. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, honestly,” he said. “I didn’t chase her, man.” (He was referring to the other alleged driver)

“Did your dad (find out)?” Dempster asked.

“No.”

The detective asked, “Why were the girls cruising around the outskirts of Kingston at two o’clock in the morning? Were they hungry? Scared? Sneaking back home? “

I don’t know, ya know?” Hamed said. “I want to find this out as much as you.”

Out of questions to ask Hamed, Dempster left him alone in the interview room. For seven minutes, with the camera still rolling, the 18-year-old got a preview of life inside a small space. He flexed his biceps, flipped through his wallet, and picked his nose. He certainly was nervous at that time and for good reason.

In Montreal, Ricardo Sanchez was dialling his phone, desperate to reach his girlfriend, Sahar. He would call her number 22 times over the next three days, each attempt forwarded to voice mail.

Part 3 will be published on Friday.