MONTREAL – A Shafia family imam calls the crimes “unforgivable.”
Ali Falih Altaie, the Muslim leader who presided over a marriage and then a funeral for members of the Montreal family, says people in his congregation have been shocked by the news they’ve heard.
“It’s unforgivable, actually, and unacceptable by any religion,” Altaie said Monday in an interview.
“Only people who have lost their brain do that… It’s unbelievable.”
Altaie’s remarks came one day after a husband and wife, and their son, were convicted of killing four family members.
The imam officiated 19-year-old Zainab Shafia’s brief marriage in May 2009 to her boyfriend Ammar Walid. The marriage was never registered because of a disagreement between the families, he said.
Just a few weeks later, Altaie presided over the heart-wrenching funeral for Zainab, her younger sisters Sahar and Geeti, and their father’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad.
Although he didn’t know the family well, Altaie said he was so overcome with grief during the funeral that he broke into tears.
“I was sad … I couldn’t handle myself well,” he said of the ceremony, attended by more than 200 people.
“Maybe if they (Zainab Shafia and Walid) were married, this might not have happened, this whole story. But we never know what is (in) the future.”
The women’s bodies were found June 30th, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario. Their murders have been described as so-called honour killings.
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