A bilingual Ottawa judge who is handling a high-profile immigration case involving a 30-year-old terrorist bombing will preside over a sensational Kingston murder trial that will unfold in at least three languages.
During discussions yesterday as part of a hearing in the Kingston Mills canal murder case, Mr. Justice Robert Maranger revealed that he likely will be the trial judge.
“I think I am,” Maranger told the lawyers. " here’s a really, really good chance I am.”
The issue arose as defence lawyer Peter Kemp was asking Maranger about scheduling pretrial motion hearings and setting aside time for a trial. Kemp said he hopes that the pre-trial issues can be handled in May and June so that a trial could begin in October or November and conclude by Christmas.
Maranger was taken aback by the timeline Kemp was outlining.
“I didn’t realize this was on such a fast track,” he said.
Maranger noted that he is still busy with the Ottawa case in which France is seeking to extradite a former Carleton University professor, Hassan Diab. The French government claims Diab is responsible for a terrorist bombing in Paris in 1980 that killed four people and injured 40 others. A radical Palestinian group is blamed for the bombing.
Yesterday Maranger was on the bench in the cavernous second-floor courtroom of Kingston’s county courthouse where three members of the Shafia family will be tried for murder.
Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 40, her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 56, and their son, Hamed, 19, are each charged with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of conspiracy to commit murder.
The accused mother and father walked, with leg shackles clinking, into the glass-encircled prisoner’s box in the centre of the courtroom. Hamed Shafia was seated at the side of the courtroom.
The hearing was convened because the three accused are seeking to have a court order lifted that bars them from communicating with three children in Montreal and with each other.
Like the preliminary hearing that concluded last week, a broad publication ban prohibits the reporting of most of what transpires during the hearing.
At the beginning of the proceeding, a lawyer representing an agency from Montreal sought to have a Whig-Standard reporter removed from the courtroom because of privacy concerns regarding evidence. The judge rejected her request and a man who works for the agency was called to testify.
Translation issues arose even before the hearing began.
“We have a little bit of a logistical problem,” Maranger said, at the beginning of the day. “We’re short one interpreter.”
It was explained that the court appointed interpreter who was supposed to appear to translate between English and Farsi, the Middle Eastern language spoken by the accused mother and father, had a last-minute medical emergency -- he was at the hospital with his wife who had gone into labour.
The lawyers agreed that a translator hired by the defence lawyers would substitute. He was seated in the prisoner box between the man and woman so that he could translate the evidence.
A woman also stood next to the witness, translating between English and French.
The witness, who appeared last week at the preliminary hearing, spent five hours on the witness stand.
Crown lawyer Laurie Lacelle told the judge, when he interrupted her questioning just after 4:30 p.m., to ask how much longer she would be, that she needed several more hours.
The lawyers realized that they might not be able to complete the hearing because the witness is not available to come back to Kingston today and defence lawyer Peter Kemp is not available on Thursday.
Another witness is expected to appear when the hearing resumes today.
Several times yesterday, the accused mother began to weep softly during the testimony. At one point, she held tissues over her nose and mouth for several minutes.
Three teenage Shafia sisters, Zainab, 19, Sahari, 17, and Geeti, 13, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, 50, were found dead inside a submerged car discovered June 30 in the Rideau Canal at Kingston Mills. Rona Mohammad was Shafia’s first wife.
