Yahya was born in 1968 in Afghanistan. The family: Mohammad Shafia, his second wife Tooba Yahya, their children, and Shafia's childless first wife Rona Amir Mohammad, who lived with them as a relative. Had come to Canada via Australia and Dubai and settled in Montreal in 2007.
On June 30, 2009 a car was found submerged in the Kingston Mills locks on the Rideau Canal in Ontario with four bodies in it: Zainab Shafia, nineteen; Sahar Shafia, seventeen; Geeti Shafia, thirteen; and Rona Amir Mohammad, fifty-two. The family, returning from a trip to Niagara Falls, said the car had gone into the water by accident with Zainab driving.
The prosecution's case was that the four had been killed elsewhere and the car pushed into the lock. The evidence included wiretapped conversations in which Shafia said his daughters had betrayed the family and that he would do it again, Rona's diary describing years of mistreatment, and the physical impossibility of the accident as described. The daughters had had boyfriends, had worn clothes their father objected to, and had been in contact with child protection services and the police before their deaths. Reports that were made and not acted on decisively.
All three were convicted of four counts of first degree murder on January 29, 2012 and sentenced to life with no parole for twenty-five years. Appeals were dismissed in 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the case in 2020, though a further appeal application on fresh-evidence grounds has been pursued since.
The case forced a national argument in Canada about honour-based violence and about what the agencies that the girls had already contacted were equipped to do. This is a family killing in one act, not a serial case, and Yahya's entry describes the same four deaths as her husband's and son's. The count should not be multiplied across them.