Without Honour

Four bodies in the water. A father mother and son convicted of murder. The shocking truth about the honourless crime that stunned a nation.. On the morning of June 30 2009 police in a small eastern Ontario city made a ghastly discovery: four females dead in a car submerged in a shallow canal. Sisters Zainab Shafia 19 Sahar Shafia 17 Geeti Shafia 13 and Rona Mohammad Amir 50 floated serenely inside the car seemingly the victims of a terrible accident. That morning Mohammad Shafia his wife Tooba and their son Hamed arrived at the Kingston police station to report the four missing. In a sweeping covert investigation that spanned three continents police uncovered layers of lies in the Shafias story and they developed a horrifying theory: Zainab Sahar Geeti and Rona had been the victims of a meticulously plotted family murder Canada s first mass honour killing.. In Without Honour award-winning journalist Rob Tripp draws on three years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews to make sense of a senseless crime in a way no other writer could. His unprecedented access tells a story beyond anything the jury heard: a story about a patriarch who fled war and strife in Afghanistan but who did not leave behind his devotion to repressive tradition. Tripp was the first journalist on the scene as the news broke and the only reporter to attend every day of court sessions through to the convictions of Shafia Tooba and Hamed on four counts each of first-degree murder fuelled by what Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger called a twisted notion of honour. In this gripping and compassionate account Tripp reveals the heartbreaking and stunning truth about the desperate lives of four women who died in the pursuit of freedom.