“The Parole Board of Canada says it approved Tooba Yahya’s request ‘for humanitarian and compassionate reasons.'”
Is there any compassion for Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti? Or would that be “Islamophobic”?
“Mother convicted in Shafia daughters’ canal killings granted 5-hour escorted absence from prison,” by Colin Harris, CBC News, December 13, 2019:
The woman convicted for her role in the so-called honour killings of her three daughters and her husband’s first wife a decade ago has been granted an escorted temporary absence from prison to visit her mother’s grave.
The Parole Board of Canada says it approved Tooba Yahya’s request “for humanitarian and compassionate reasons,” because her risk of recidivism is low and because the security risk that the absence poses is “manageable.”
Yahya, along with her husband, Mohammad Shafia, and son Hamed, were found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in Kingston, Ont., in January 2012 in a court case that attracted international attention.
The bodies of the three Shafia daughters — Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 — and Shafia’s first wife, Rona Mohammad Amir, were found in the family’s car, submerged in a lock on the Rideau Canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009.
The family, originally from Afghanistan, had moved to Montreal two years earlier.
The judge said the murders were committed in the name of a “notion of honour that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honour that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”
The jury heard that Shafia was furious with how his daughters dressed and behaved. Jurors heard recordings made after their deaths, where the girls’ father called them “treacherous” and “whores.”
Entries from Amir’s diary were also presented during the trial, in which she wrote that Yahya “took the power of the household” from her and that Yahya was indifferent to a suicide attempt made by Sahar, the middle daughter.
Shafia had been married to both women, though the family had claimed that Amir was a cousin when she immigrated to Canada.
‘You said that you could not save them’Throughout the 2012 trial, the accused maintained they were never at the locks when the Nissan Sentra carrying the four victims plunged into the canal.
But at the hearing in which Yahya requested to visit her mother’s grave, she offered a different version of those events.
“You confirmed that your husband, with the complicity of your son, committed the murder in front of your eyes,” says the Parole Board of Canada decision, dated Sept. 10, which has been obtained by CBC News….
The decision notes Yahya’s “impeccable” behaviour in prison and that, after her appeal was dismissed in 2016, she has talked more openly about the killings….