Kingston Penitentiary – the oldest federal prison in Canada -  will close this year as part of the federal Conservative’s get tough on crime agenda…err…budget cuts. Some people are predicting hard economic times in the Limestone City.&#16…

Reflections on the Shafia murder trial

TORONTO—Somewhere in the calm setting of an Islamic cemetery in Laval, Quebec, lie four headstones belonging to…

Dear Readers; Now that the case has gone to the jury, I feel it is time to comment on this trail where most of a family were wiped out! There is still debate among some people as to the true facts behind this murder / accident, so we present this article in the hope that [...]

After Tooba Mohammad Yahya had worked herself into a frenzy of tears and fury — you could see it building for ages, the way you can see a train coming on the prairie — she heaved and sobbed in the witness box for a few minutes, her face covered by a tissue

What is clear from Tooba Mohammad Yahya’s ongoing stint in the witness box is that while she may be just an accused murderess, she is a proven dissembler and artful dodger

KINGSTON, Ont. — It was alternately amusing and outrageous, often inappropriately entertaining, but mostly the evidence of Tooba Mohammad Yahya was shattering in its chill and staggering in its audacity. Ms. Yahya is in the witness stand here at her own trial, where she, her husband Mohammad Shafia and their eldest son Hamed are charged …

Tooba Mohammad Yahya, so voluble, so impossible to corral, so theatrical, wept only once Monday. It was when she was describing her own magnificent sacrifice

KINGSTON, Ont. — If it is the unusual child who knowingly orphans himself – does something, says something, that would see him robbed of his parents forever — it is nonetheless the rarest of birds who so cheerfully sacrifices the dead in the name of the living. Enter one of Mohammad Shafia’s and Tooba Mohammad …

Despite the limits of the young couple’s conversation – on cell and by text – it seems clear that on the last nights of her life, Sahar Shafia may have had a sense of foreboding, however faint

KINGSTON, Ont. — What a wretched tale of misery is unfolding at the Shafia family murder trial here. Whatever verdicts the Ontario Superior Court jury ultimately reaches, what is virtually undeniable is that this household functioned like a mini totalitarian state, where everyone walked on eggshells or outright lived in fear and where intimates were …

KINGSTON, Ont. — It was Hamed and Mohammad Shafia who in unison repeatedly dabbed at their eyes in the prisoner’s box here Monday, but there were likely many in the courtroom who during the course of the day would have happily joined them. From time to time, the trial of this Afghan-Canadian family, for a …

KINGSTON, Ont. — There are two stories from Shafia-land, the murder trial of one side of an Afghan-Canadian family accused of the mass “honour killing” of the other side, which really tell the tale. The first happened in the spring of 2008, more than a year before teenagers Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia were found …

KINGSTON, Ont. — If the Kingston Police had handled the investigation of the deaths of three girls and an adult woman whose bodies were discovered on their turf as Montreal school officials and child-protection workers handled the complaints of familial violence and oppression which came their way when all those people were still alive, they …

KINGSTON, Ont. — By almost any standards, but particularly those of modern teenagers and young adults, Zainab Shafia’s relationship with the poor young fellow now in the witness stand was as stunted and utterly sad as her life. The boy is testifying at the trial of the parents and brother who are jointly accused of …

One day last week at the trial of the Shafia family in Kingston, Ont., as court was hearing a relative describe the small freedoms the teenage girls in that family so hungered for – Canadian friends, makeup and clothes, the company of boys — I found there were tears streaming down my face. They had …

KINGSTON, Ont. — The three were in the family minivan, that most cozily domestic of North American vehicles, on a lazy July Saturday two years ago. Some of the discussions were comfortingly banal: The mother phoned one of the kids at home to make sure he and his siblings had eaten and wondered idly, “Is …

KINGSTON, Ont. — Picture this: Mohammad Shafia was being interrogated by an RCMP officer who had caught him flat-footed in a couple of whoppers, not that this is a stunning achievement, given Mr. Shafia’s quirky relationship with the truth. Still, Mr. Shafia had just finished telling this officer, Inspector Shahin Mehdizadeh, that Rona Amir Mohammad …

KINGSTON, Ont. — Theirs was such a sweetly small cri du coeur — to wear Western clothing; to go to the library; to have Canadian friends and to venture “outside,” as the wider world beyond the family yoke was called within the household. As the eldest of the girls, Zainab Shafia, once told a relative, …

KINGSTON, Ont. — It was, in retrospect, predictable as rain: Things were going way too smoothly at the honour-killing trial of three Afghan immigrants for it to last. The trial flew off the rails on Thursday, when Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger told jurors that one of the trio of accused Shafia family members …

KINGSTON, Ont. — On the lengthy video police interview now being played for Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger and a jury, Tooba Mohammad Yahya pressed her face into the pictures of her children, wept, threw back her head and for a long while keened. From the prisoner’s box, with a full view of her …