Early on June 30, 2009, a Nissan belonging to a Montreal family was found submerged in the Kingston Mills locks on the Rideau Canal in Ontario. Inside were four bodies: Zainab Shafia, nineteen; Sahar Shafia, seventeen; Geeti Shafia, thirteen; and Rona Amir Mohammad, who had been the first wife of the girls' father. Her age is given variously as fifty, fifty-two and fifty-eight. The family, driving home from a trip to Niagara Falls, said the car had gone into the water by accident with Zainab at the wheel.
Three weeks later, on July 22, police arrested the girls' father, Mohammad Shafia; his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, the mother of the three girls; and their son Hamed. The household had come to Canada from Afghanistan in 2007, by way of Australia and Dubai, and settled in Montreal. Rona, childless, had lived with them as part of the family.
The Crown's case at the three-month trial in Kingston was that the four had been killed and the car pushed into the lock to make it look like an accident. Police listening devices had recorded Shafia after the deaths speaking contemptuously of his daughters for dating and saying they had shamed the family. "We lost our honour," he was heard to say. "They betrayed us immensely." The jury also heard that the girls had worn clothes and kept boyfriends their father objected to, that they had been in touch with child protection workers and police before they died, and that Rona had written of years of mistreatment in the household. Shahrzad Mojab, a University of Toronto professor, testified as an expert on honor-based violence. Against Yahya specifically, the Crown argued that she could be found guilty of murder not only as a participant but because her failure to protect her children from her husband made her causally responsible for their deaths.
On January 29, 2012, the jury found all three guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. Yahya was forty-two. The sentences were automatic: life imprisonment with no parole for twenty-five years, counted from the arrests in July 2009.
On appeal the three argued that the expert evidence on honor killing had invited the jury to convict them on cultural stereotype, and that the trial judge had not properly instructed the jury on the Crown's failure-to-protect theory against Yahya. Hamed also sought to introduce Afghan documents showing, he said, that he had been seventeen, not eighteen, when his sisters died, and should have been tried as a youth. On November 2, 2016, the Court of Appeal for Ontario, in reasons written by Justice David Watt, dismissed every ground, observing that honor had been a recurring subject in the family's own conversations after the deaths. The Supreme Court of Canada refused Hamed leave to appeal on April 13, 2017.
The case set off a national argument in Canada about honor-based violence and about why the warnings the girls had given child welfare workers and police had not protected them.
2007: the family comes to Canada from Afghanistan and settles in Montreal.
June 30, 2009: a car is found in the Kingston Mills locks on the Rideau Canal with the bodies of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia and Rona Amir Mohammad inside.
July 22, 2009: police arrest Mohammad Shafia, Tooba Mohammad Yahya and their son Hamed.
January 29, 2012: a jury in Kingston finds all three guilty of four counts of first-degree murder.
November 2, 2016: the Court of Appeal for Ontario dismisses every ground of their appeals.
April 13, 2017: the Supreme Court of Canada refuses Hamed leave to appeal.