Honour on Trial by Paul Schliesmann Page A

— even though he realized his Catholic parents would be as upset about his marrying a Muslim as Sahar's would be about her seeing a Catholic.
    One person who learned of the depth of Sahar's concern about her parents was Ricardo's aunt, Erma Medina. For quite a while, Medina also believed Sahar's name was Natasha, until the girl told her otherwise. She wanted to know more about this beautiful young woman her nephew was dating, and one day she asked Sahar about her home life.
    Sahar told Medina that "the day her parents knew about her relationship with Ricardo she would be a dead woman. She told me several times. All the time she was talking to me, she was serious."
    In April 2009, at a birthday gathering with Ricardo's family, Sahar had revealed she was going to tell her parents about her boyfriend and their plan to move to Honduras. Medina was asked in court why Sahar would do so, knowing it would cause serious trouble for her. "Because she loved Ricardo," the aunt replied. "She told me she would love him until death."
    There was a particularly close call one day as the couple was sitting in a restaurant with a girlfriend of Sahar's. In walked Sahar's younger brother, whose identity cannot be revealed due to a court publication ban.
    "I was embracing Sahar," Ricardo recalled. "When she saw he was coming she said to stop embracing her because this boy didn't know about our relationship. He arrived and he started to ask if Sahar was my girlfriend. Later I told him she wasn't my girlfriend — that we just met."
    Sahar looked scared. Her girlfriend told the brother that Ricardo was her boyfriend, not Sahar's. But that wasn't good enough. The boy was suspicious — and persistent.
    "He told me I had to prove it," said Ricardo, who described him as "really pressing, like a kid that needs candy."
    "I had to grab the other girl and kiss her in front of him."
    There was some normalcy when the two couples — Sahar and Ricardo, Zainab and Ammar — double-dated, occasionally going out to a movie or to a restaurant. One time, Sahar even introduced Ricardo to Geeti at school as her boyfriend. "She was normal. She didn't say anything," said Ricardo of the little sister.
    In court on November 29, 2011, Ricardo Sanchez was asked to read a sampling of the love texts he had sent to Sahar in the days and weeks before her death. They were recovered from Sahar's phone that was found in the Nissan Sentra after it was lifted from the bottom of the Rideau Canal.
    Ricardo sent one of the texts to her just two days before she set out on the family trip. "The only thing I would wish in this world is to have you every day of my life. The world is very large and one day I could even lose you," the young man read in Spanish. "But in this world as large as it is there's a small heart and you can never get lost in that one heart because it's only for you, my love."
    Ricardo was unable to read the entire message in the hushed courtroom without crying and stopping to control his emotions. Not a sound could be heard but the young man's quiet voice.
    In the darkness of the back seat of the Nissan the night of June 29, as they drove toward home along Highway 401, Sahar texted Ricardo to say she was with Rona, Zainab, and Geeti. They were just two or three hours away from Montreal but the decision had been made to stop at Kingston for the night.
    "Their father had told them they were gonna stop at a hotel because they were tired," Ricardo testified. "All she said was that she found it very strange they were in that car and their father was in a different car."

Zainab's engagement…
    LATIF Hyderi made his courtesy phone call to Mohammad Shafia in Dubai in May 2009 — the father of the prospective groom paying his respects to the father of the bride and seeking permission to go ahead with the marriage arrangement. Everything seemed to be going well on the Montreal end. Tooba and Hamed were on board. The young people themselves seemed