Remember, when 'you are talking on the phone you are talking to the world'

It is hard to believe they spoke like this by telephone. Remember, when 'you are talking on the phone you are talking to the world'

http://bit.ly/rWU64H

Wiretaps record Shafia comparing daughter to 'whore'  

KINGSTON—Honour before life.

It's a lesson of enormous gravity of which Mohammed Shafia reminds his son Hamed as they talk, the two of them, a police-planted bug recording every word they say, inside the family's Pontiac Montana minivan.

It's not yet two weeks after the floating corpses of four of their family members — Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Shafia's first wife Rona Amir Mohammad — were found inside a car submerged in the Kingston Mills Locks.

It's close to midnight. "Be I dead or alive, nothing in the world is above (your) honour," Shafia says.

"Isn't that right, my son?"

An example of "nasty or dishonour," he offers: If "your sister or my daughter or your mother's daughter" is with a man that Sharia law forbids, anyone other than a father, brother, uncle or grandparents.

Prosecutors on Monday presented a flurry of wiretap evidence to the jury in the trial of Shafia, his wife and son, all charged with murder in the 2009 deaths.

The wiretaps, clandestinely placed on their phones, in the family's home in Montreal's Saint Leonard borough, in the van, in a police car taking them away after their arrests, captured not only Shafia's absence of regret, but his vociferous animosity toward the girls, particularly Zainab.

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At one point in the conversations, Shafia, 58, tells his 41-year-old wife Tooba Yahya that they have done nothing as parents to deserve the behaviour of their daughters.

"May the devil sh-- on their graves!" he says. "Is that what a daughter should be? Would (a daughter) be such a whore?"

On July 20, he is continuing his arguments in the van. The girls "messed up . . . They were treacherous," he tells his wife. "They betrayed both themselves and us."

He compares them to prostitutes: "Like this woman standing on the side of the road and if you stop the car, she would go with you anywhere."

He pleads with Yahya, that what's happening "isn't harder" than watching them with boyfriends.

"For this reason," he says, whenever he sees their pictures, "I am consoled. I say to myself, 'You did well. Would they come back to life a hundred times, for you to do the same again.' That is how hurt I am."

Tooba reminds him the girls said he was meddling in their affairs, which annoys him. "We used to admonish her not to hang around with boys . . . that wasn't bad advice." He's talking about Zainab, who at one point had a Pakistani boyfriend.

Police also intercept a call to Hamed on July 20 from a Qatar Airways agent, to confirm Hamed's flight to Dubai on July 22.

During that call, Hamed, 20, asks if it's possible to leave the very next day.

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