Honour on Trial by Paul Schliesmann Page A

to Montreal to complete some business. Police found it odd that Hamed's cellphone, which he claimed he always had with him, would have been with Shafia in the Lexus. Shafia said he, too, was surprised when it rang near Kingston. It was a call from his children saying they missed him, that they were becoming bored in Niagara, and that they wanted him to return — which he did, without ever getting to Montreal.
    The police theory was much different. They suspected that Hamed and Shafia were both in the Lexus that day. The reason for their hasty trip: to scout out Kingston Mills, where they had stopped just three days before to use the washrooms, as a suitable place to commit a quadruple murder.

The ruse…
    KINGSTON Police asked Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed to come to Kingston on July 18 to retrieve their belongings left in the Kingston East Motel room. The Shafias were also hoping to get their vehicles back — both the Lexus and the Nissan. This was all part of a ruse devised by police.
    Once they suspected the three family members of murder, police applied for a warrant to plant listening devices in both the minivan and the home belonging to the Shafias. In Canada, it is both illegal and unconstitutional to intercept private communications using a wiretap without first obtaining a warrant through the court.
    At the station, officers asked the Shafias to leave their van unlocked in case it had to be moved. They did so and went into the office. This gave police the time they needed to place a wiretap in the van.
    For the next four days, the Shafias would be monitored and recorded from a police centre in Ottawa. Their conversations would be translated into English and carefully scrutinized by investigators. The recordings would provide some of the most damning evidence at trial: the now infamous words of Shafia, callings his daughters "whores," exhorting the devil to "shit on their graves," and vowing that if they ever returned to life, he would take a cleaver to them.
    After turning over the belongings, police asked the Shafias if they wanted to go to Kingston Mills to see where their family members had died. They agreed, and the first stop, with the Shafias following the police in their van, was the Kingston East Motel. "We want to take you through what we think happened," a police officer's voice can be heard on the van wiretap. "So we think they [the Nissan] started [from] here, and then the locks are north from here."
    Police, of course, didn't believe this version of events at all. They no longer accepted the Shafias' story that the four women were at the motel that night and left on a joyride to Kingston Mills. But they were willing to play along for now.
    At Kingston Mills, the three Shafias walked around the grounds. Police then told them that one of the canal buildings had had a surveillance camera operating the night of June 29-30. Of course, this was not true; there was no camera. But the information had the effect police had hoped for.
    Mohammad, Tooba, and Hamed were barely back in their van and on the highway when Hamed began talking about what the police had just told them.
    "They're lying," Shafia told him. "If there was a camera, they'd access it in a minute." Tooba kept returning to the topic. "If there had been a camera, they would have taken it out a long time ago and checked it," she said. "They wouldn't have left it like that. They're just lying; they're trying to sound us out." Then, a few minutes later, she added: "There was no camera over there. I looked around; there wasn't any. If, God forbid, God forbid, there was one in that little house, all three of us [were there], no?"
    Tooba then turned the conversation in another direction. "There was a lot of water, not a little … There was a piece of wood. How come it didn't get stuck there?" she asked.
    "That piece was far," her husband answered.
    "God so took away their common sense, they didn't think they had no business there," Tooba