KINGSTON—Dead and moldering in their graves yet still bad girls.

Scheming, betraying, devious daughters: Zainab, Sahar, Geeti.

Whores.

No less an authority than their father says so — the man accused of murdering them, in cahoots with a wife and a son.

“They lied to us. If they hadn’t hidden everything from us, this would not have been their destiny,” Mohammad Shafia said on the witness stand Thursday.

“They destroyed their lives and ours, too.”

The blame rests with them, exclusively, the sisters whose bodies were found in a submerged Nissan on June 30, 2009, and presumably also Shafia’s first wife, Rona Amir Mohammad, who drowned with the girls — if only for the shared carelessness that had put them all in the Kingston Mills Locks.

The son, Hamed, Shafia had commended to God in a conversation captured on police wiretaps. But for the slain teenagers who were also flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, the defendant had only curses and fury in the days afterwards.

“You never once spoke that way about your daughters, did you?” challenged Crown attorney Laurie Lacelle in her lengthy cross-examination. “You never commended them to God. You said, ‘may God sh-- on their graves.’”

Shafia: “Yes, because we are innocent and it is now in God’s hands.”

For Allah to judge the deceased then — it was out of his hands as, indeed, it would have been out of his hands anyway if the two eldest girls, the ones who’d taken inappropriate boyfriends, Sahar doing so secretly, had come to him, as dutiful Afghan daughters should, and requested to be given away in marriage. After that, safely wedded, the girls would no longer have been his problem or his property or his shame.

“If they wanted to walk around naked or covered, nobody would have asked me. This would be their husbands’ responsibilities.”

But what did Geeti, a 13-year-old child, do to have merited her father’s wrath? On this, Shafia was unclear. The youngster had shoplifted, stolen a muffin from school, demanded that child welfare authorities place her with a foster family and, as court has heard, babbled about intolerable restrictions in the household, cut classes, dressed in revealing clothes, spilled secrets to outsiders. Yet Shafia claimed he’d known little of this, learned most of the details only after Geeti and the others were dead.

He was, after all, a busy man, a busy businessman whose job kept him away from the family’s Montreal home most of the time, wife Tooba Yahya left to rule the roost. No, not Hamed in his father’s stead, Shafia insisted. Hamed, at 18 when the deaths occurred, was little more than a boy himself, never authorized by his dad to discipline his sisters, as court has been told by other witnesses.

Tooba Yahya is Shafia’s second wife. He had a brace of them in the traditionally polygamous Afghan arrangement, though lying to immigration authorities so that Rona could join the clan, presented as a relative and helpmate in rearing the children. So, Shafia conceded, he was a liar, too.

Further, Shafia told Lacelles, he did not know if the children actually realized Rona was also his wife and not the “aunt’’ as they always called her in public.

“In all these years, we never had any discussion or argument about this. My children called her auntie. We never had this issue at home.”

This trial is about who killed the victims and how they came to perish in a canal, with the Nissan in which they were riding — which their mother had originally been driving — wedged up against one of the gates. But in the exploration of the crime — an “honour killing” to restore the family’s reputation, as the prosecution is alleging — a harsh light has been shone into the domestic anatomy of a deeply troubled family, where everyone seems to have been flailing under the pressure of conflicting cultures.

The daughters pined to be more Canadian, like their friends. The parents clung fiercely to old-country traditions. And Rona, poor Rona, the barren and eclipsed first wife, just finally wanted out.

The result, says the prosecution, was a mass killing, incomprehensible in its magnitude and sheer calculating evil.

A dreadful accident, said Shafia, in the videotaped interrogations that police conducted after the grisly discovery at the bottom of the locks.

Oddly, there was barely any discussion of events from that awful night in the courtroom on Thursday. The queries meandered elsewhere, from both before and after the females died just outside Kingston. What was most starkly illuminated were the cultural imperatives imposed on his womenfolk by Shafia — mandates that he still does not question or doubt and which he struggled to make the jury understand.

He was a doting dad, liberal-minded, kind, generous, dispensing of paternal advice and would have given his own life for his kids — to hear Shafia tell it.

And tell it he did, taking the stand in his own defence against the first-degree murder charges.

“They had no fear of me, never,” the 59-year-old insisted of his seven children. “But if they had done anything wrong, they were shamed and would hide it from me.”

It was only discoveries made after their death, Shafia explained, that provoked towering rage toward the victims, pitiless slurs picked up by bugs police had planted in the family’s Pontiac minivan.

The most scathing and shocking: “May the devil sh-- on their graves.”

That remark, stunning in its lack of sympathy for dead daughters, has hung over this trial since it was first quoted in the Crown’s opening statement seven weeks ago.

Shafia, in testimony that rambled wildly and was often utterly incomprehensible — admittedly, clumsily elicited by his defence lawyer Peter Kemp — attempted to explain it away, rationalize and contextualize the harsh words.

It was a photograph of second-oldest daughter Sahar, just 17 when she died, that had driven Shafia into a July 19 tirade.

He’d fulminated to Tooba: “Even if they come back to life a hundred times, if I have a cleaver in my hand, I will cut (her) in pieces. Not once but a hundred times, as they acted that cruel towards you and me. For the love of God, what had we done to them? What excess had we committed . . . that they undressed themselves in front of boys?”

Shafia told court he’d been going through the house, cleaning up in advance of relatives arriving from overseas for the victims’ funeral, when he came upon a photograph of a young man — he thought this might have been a cousin of Tooba — and later, in a photo album, a picture in which Sahar, wearing a short denim skirt, is being embraced by the same boy.

Shafia could not believe his eyes.

“I was not happy seeing this picture. I did not think my children would be this way. I never expected my children to do this.

“My children did a lot of cruelty to me.”

See, he was the victim.

The defendant admitted cursing his daughters when they were barely in the ground.

“I swore at my children. They did treachery to me. They lied to me. They hid everything from us.”

Yet he also presented himself as a benevolent dad, far more liberal than the Afghan culture in the home country he left behind nearly two decades ago, before the clan of 10 washed up on Canada’s shores in 2007, settling in Montreal.

“We took them to parks, buy them dresses, give them money, feed them.

“My children, I loved them like my own life. If one of them was late for one hour, I would go out searching for them.

“I would give them good advice and prevent them from doing bad things.”

Zainab was 19, Sahar 17, Geeti 13. They and 52-year-old Rona, as court has heard, chafed under strict patriarchal control and the de facto man-of-the-house authority applied by Hamed, purportedly disciplinarian during his businessman father’s frequent absences.

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It was Sahar, apparently, who most deeply outraged her father, when he came across those photographs of her, dressed so wantonly, in the arms of a young man who must have been a boyfriend kept hidden.

“She had a short skirt and a guy hugging her. I swore because I did not expect this from my children. I did not expect that.”

Especially not from Sahar, Shafia continued, the daughter who announced she wanted to become a doctor, which was so pleasing to her father.

“I had so much trust in Sahar. I (never) even raised my voice at her. I could not believe it. She betrayed me. She lied to me.”

If only, Shafia said, Sahar had come and told him that she’d found a beau. He would have advised her calmly, Sahar claimed — would have pointed out the wrongness of marrying someone who wasn’t Muslim. Though Sahar was only 17, a schoolgirl, marriage was the only possible outcome Shafia could envision for her, with a boy in the picture. The concept of dating was completely foreign to him.

He clearly does not understand the concept of dating.

Sahar’s inexcusable public behavior with a boy came to light only after her death, Shafia insisted. It was Zainab who’d been the difficult daughter before then. The teenager had been discovered having a relationship with a young Pakistani man her parents considered unsuitable.

“I was in Dubai at the time” when he heard of Zainab’s romance. Upon his return, “I went to the school and asked what type of a person is he? He was a man who is always drunk. He is not a good person.”

Shafia recalled having a talk with Zainab about her wrongheadedness in wanting to marry that fellow. “I asked Zainab, do you love this boy? Do you want to marry him? She said, yes daddy.

“I told her, he’s not a good boy. Your future will not be good. I did what any father would do. I said, he’s a Muslim, so there are no restricts. But he is not a good boy and that is my advice to you. He is a drunk, he has no job, you will not have a good future with him.”

Yet he paid for the marriage reception that took place — while Shafia was again in Dubai. That union was dissolved within 24 hours after Tooba fainted at the restaurant and Zainab purportedly gave up her heart’s desire in an act of repentance and contrition.

“Zainab called me and we had greetings. She said, ‘Daddy, I’m sorry. I want to offer my apologies that I did not listen. Whatever you tell me now, I will listen. Please forgive me.’

“I said, okay, I’ve already forgiven you.”

When Shafia shortly thereafter returned from Dubai, Zainab came to her parents’ bedroom as he was changing clothes, he testified. “She told me, ‘Daddy, please forgive me.’ I gave her $100 and I kissed her face.”

Yet he’d called Zainab and Sahar whores and invoked the devil to defecate on their graves. This, he agreed under questioning from defence lawyers, was a common Afghan expression.

He explained further: “To me, it means that the devil would go and check with them in their graves. If they had done a good thing it would be good, if they did bad it would be up to God what to do.”

Under Kemp’s questioning, Shafia admitted he’d sponsored Rona to Canada as a relative when she was, in fact, his first wife.

“We would never leave Rona (behind). She didn’t have anyone else. It never crossed my mind to leave her someplace, in a house alone. My conscience would never accept that.”

He denied — as court has been told by Rona’s sister and other witnesses — that the deceased was unhappy in the household and had sought a divorce. They were, he maintained, one big happy family.

“Me, Tooba, Rona, we would all eat together, all of us. She was a human being. If we went out, we never left her at home.”

Kemp: “Did you ever hit or strike Rona?”

Shafia: “I never hit Rona but I did swear at her.”

But the crisis in the household — that started with Zainab, said Shafia.

“The problem was Zainab. My other family members did not have any problems. And Zainab was sorry for what she did. Sahar, she didn’t complain about me at all.”

The scales fell from his eyes, though, when he saw those photos of Sahar, decadently dressed, in the arms of a boy. So he blasted her.

“It’s completely true, I said those things. Me, as a father, I cannot accept those things.’’

He sighed. A family destroyed, he said, for the recklessness of daughters, three dead, one in the docket, three others removed from the family the day before the arrests and placed in care.

“They didn’t just kill themselves. They killed us, too. Three of my children are living outside their house, four of us are in prison.”