Teary Mother Admits Being Present the Night Her 3 Daughters Were Murdered by Her Son and Husband (866 hits)
KINGSTON, Ont. - A Montreal woman accused of killing her three daughters slowly changed her tune during a six-hour interrogation, as the investigator tried to appeal to motherly guilt, but he suggested her new story was just as implausible, court heard Wednesday. [...] Yahya, Shafia and Hamed were arrested July 22, 2009, and on Wednesday the jury watched much of the video of the long interrogation of Tooba. RCMP Insp. Shahin Mehdizadeh was brought in to conduct the interview in Farsi.
For much of the interview, Mehdizadeh goes over Yahya's story with her piece by piece, pointing out evidence to the contrary and accusing her of lying to him. "This is not an accident, madam," he says. "You know what has happened here ... I don't want the lies. I don't want the lie that Zainab came and took the key and after that I didn't see her." "Someone became God that night and decided that these three girls and this lady should have been killed," Mehdizadeh says. "When they did this, they didn't do their work right, I am telling you." Eventually, Yahya starts changing her story, bit by bit, but begins by asking that Mehdizadeh not tell her husband.
She admits the three of them were at the canal that night, and that the four dead people never made it to the motel. Yahya tries to pin it on Shafia, saying she and Hamed were walking by the canal and they heard a splash, ran over and saw the car in the water. It was at that point that she fainted, she said. "I grab my hair and fell down," she says. "When I got to the motel I was still not thinking that the girls had been fallen into the water. I thought that their dad had already taken them. I was thinking like this. Do you understand?"
Mehdizadeh tells her that is "impossible." Police know that Hamed didn't stay at the motel in Kingston that night with the rest of his surviving family, rather that he drove through the night to Montreal, where he hit a pole in a parking lot, Mehdizadeh says. He called police the morning of June 30 to report that collision, which the Crown alleges he staged to mask damage the Lexus sustained while pushing the Nissan into the canal.
Mehdizadeh is incredulous that in Yahya's version of events, Hamed didn't call 911 after seeing four people plunge into the water in a car, but immediately called police to report a minor, single-vehicle collision. "Hamed put you in the motel and he went to Montreal," Mehdizadeh says. "Four women have died here, yet nobody calls the police to come and save them when this had happened. That's why I am saying that you are lying." At several points in the interview Mehdizadeh appeals to Yahya to do her "motherly job" and tell the truth and do the right thing now for her dead daughters. "I want you, for the sake of your own daughters, for the sake of your daughters' souls, if you have any respect for them, tell me the truth," he says. Mehdizadeh adds that he is only 42, but his hair has turned grey by these sorts of terrible cases, by seeing pictures likes the ones of her children. "You are still young," Yahya replies.
