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TORONTO — The night he surrendered to Toronto police, Peer Khairi likened himself to an overburdened elephant, painting a pitiful image of his life in the months before he slit his wife’s throat.

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“He said that it was unbearable,” Det.-Sgt. Peter Code testified Tuesday at Mr. Khairi’s second-degree murder trial in Ontario Superior Court. “He went on to make a comparison by stating that even an elephant, when it has too much weight on its back, will start to moan or cry.”

For Mr. Khairi, the court heard, that weight was his family’s willingness to embrace Canadian culture after emigrating from Afghanistan by way of India. It was the fact that his children did not dress sufficiently Muslim. It was that his wife not only allowed this, but stood up for those freedoms, and her own.

And so, one night at the tail end of winter 2008, Mr. Khairi decided enough was enough, the court heard.

His wife had taken his son’s side and she was yelling at him to leave their son alone

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“He couldn’t take it anymore [and] it happened,” Det.-Sgt. Code testified, relying on his own memory of Mr. Khairi’s unrecorded confession.