National Post (National Edition)
‘Honour killer’ an ‘angry little man’: testimony
OTTAWA • Kingston Penitentiary was already a very scary place the day Mohammad Shafia walked into the joint.
The Montrealer was convicted for the 2009 murders of his three daughters and first wife in a barbaric “honour killing” in which the women were incapacitated and dumped into the Rideau Canal near Kingston. In Shafia’s twisted interpretation of Islam, his daughters were too western, had brought shame upon the family and therefore had to die.
It wasn’t long before he unleashed another reign of religious terror at the notorious jail, an insider revealed Monday.
Ottawa psychologist Robert Groves, testifying before a Senate national security committee about Islamic radicalization in prisons, told spellbound parliamentarians how Shafia used ultra-radical Islam and old-fashioned bullying to control and intimidate about 25 men.
Canada’s only Muslim prison chaplain would occasionally lead Muslim inmates in Friday prayers. “There would be a general atmosphere of jovial camaraderie among themselves and the non-Muslim,” said Groves, who did psychological counselling at the prison.
But when the Muslim chaplain was absent, Shafia apparently appointed himself spiritual leader.
“The normally pleasant atmosphere associated with Muslims gathering for prayers was absent. Inmates on the same range who came to see me expressed fear of him. (About one-third) were not Muslims but believed they dare not refuse to attend Friday prayers. They had no choice. He was an angry little man.”
One, a Christian, “felt so intimidated by Shafia and some of his lieutenants that he chose to give up his relative freedom of movement on the range and in the general population for a much more restricted life on a social isolation range. He advised me that confinement was worth it to avoid the hassle of dealing with ‘the Muslims.’
“This form of intimidation is something one finds routinely with zealot extremists. In other circumstances it’s called bullying.”
Shafia, an Afghan; his second wife in the polygamist family, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21; were convicted on four counts of first-degree murder. The bodies of his three daughters — Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 — were found along with that of Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, in June 2009 in their submerged Nissan Sentra in a canal lock.
The family immigrated to Canada in 2007. Shafia believed his daughters were becoming too interested in boys and too immodest. And he believed his childless first wife, Rona Amir, was a bad influence on the girls.
While Groves described Shafia as a “radical” Islamist, his observations were anecdotal and he acknowledged having no evidence to show Shafia’s followers were radicalized by his authoritarian religious beliefs.
“There wasn’t a gang yet of radical Muslims out to conquer the whole prison population.”