Toronto mother’s throat slit for letting children adopt Canadian culture, court hears in alleged honour killing trial
Randjida Khairi was stabbed five times in her chest and back. She had her throat cut, a wound so ugly and deep that it sliced through her neck muscles, voicebox and windpipe—stopping only at her spine.
She was stabbed with two different knives. She drowned in her own blood; a process a pathologist would later determine took between five and 10 minutes. Police discovered Ms. Khairi’s body lying on a bloody cot in her family home, a 16th floor apartment in the northwest corner of Toronto, otherwise all tidy and neat, with a kitchen full of pots.
The victim was the mother of six. The victim was married to her killer for 30 years.
On Wednesday, Peer Khairi, a silver-haired man and an Afghan immigrant, sat in the defendant’s box of a downtown Toronto courtroom following the proceedings through a Dari interpreter, fingering a parade of gruesome crime scene photographs of his dead wife, taken by police on March 18, 2008, and presented to the court as evidence. [LA replies: Four and a half years to come to trial? Canada is worse than us.] …
The Crown has told the court that, as a new arrival to this country, Mr. Khairi struggled with Canadian ways, often fighting with his wife over how she allowed their children to dress, to become more Western—to drift from the “culture and the rules of their birth place.”
That place is Afghanistan, a patriarchal society where women, be they wives or teenagers or young girls, disobey their husbands, any man, really, at their own peril. This is not an over-simplification. This is a tragic fact. [LA replies: Yes, you liberal idiots, and by allowing Muslims to immigrate into your Western country, where they will naturally be influenced by Western ways, you are encouraging those wives and girls to behave exactly in the manner that will put them at peril. ]
“These photographs are going to be very shocking to you,” Justice Robert Clark warned jurors before the crime scene images made the rounds. “You may find them somewhat upsetting … “
He continued, saying how the photographs of the victim with her throat cut wide might make the jurors angry, but that they should try to consider them calmly and in conjunction with the rest of the evidence presented.
Ms. Khairi, the court was told, had been thinking of leaving her husband. She spoke to other people, complete strangers in some cases, about her plans. Mr. Khairi told police upon his arrest that he felt disrespected, wronged by his children and betrayed by a wife who had turned against him. Now she is dead.
The trial resumes Thursday.