MONTREAL - Zainab Shafia planned to celebrate young love on July 1 with the announcement of her engagement.
On June 30, her body was one of four pulled from a submerged car at Kingston Mills.
Awaiting the 19-year-old's return to Montreal was an anxious fiance-to-be, 27-year-old Hussain Hyderi, who is her distant cousin.
"I never loved anyone as much as I loved Zainab," a distraught Hyderi told Sun Media in an exclusive interview this week.
Zainab had talked to him while she was on a family trip to Niagara Falls and Toronto.
The family stopped in Kingston on the way home.
Her body and those of her sisters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and their father's first wife, Rona Amir Mohammed, 50, were discovered in the car pulled from the Kingston Mills locks.
Mohammed Shafia, his second wife, Tooba, and their 18-year-old son, Hamed, are charged with murdering the four women.
Though Hyderi wants to clear up what he considers to be misinformation about Zainab, he insists it's not the right time for him to pour out his heart about their relationship.
He last spoke to her on June 29, the day her family has said they were passing through Kingston.
"We were actually supposed to get engaged within two days," Hyderi said.
Remarkably, it would have been Zainab's second marriage in a matter of a few months.
Mina Barak says her good friend, Ammar Waheed, wed Zainab in an Islamic ceremony a few months ago.
"He told me that they actually got married," Barak, 20, who lives in Montreal, told Sun Media yesterday.
"They went to the mosque."
She said Waheed is "very upset" and "traumatized" by Zainab's death.
"He is a good guy but to get married was a very wrong decision on his behalf because he doesn't have anything to support her," Barak said.
She said the union was solemnized with the signing of an Islamic marriage certificate, a nikah.
It is the first confirmation of claims voiced weeks ago by relatives of Rona Mohammed in Europe. Her siblings allege that Zainab deeply offended her strict Afghan father by marrying a young Pakistani man.
"It is likely this was a crime of honour, designed to return honour to the father of the family who was tainted by the hidden marriage," Diba Masoomi wrote, in an e-mail sent to Kingston Police and to Sun Media.
Barak said Waheed is of Pakistani descent.
She said that Waheed's family did not approve of the marriage and did not attend the ceremony.
Soon after it was completed, Zainab realized it was a mistake.
"She was like, 'Oh well, then I can't do this anymore,' but the nikah was already done and she told [Waheed] to go get married to the girl that his mom wanted for him," Barak said.
Waheed told Barak that the document certifying the marriage disappeared.
"He said that Hamed [Shafia] took the papers so there's no proof of it," she said.
Hussain Hyderi refused to comment on the revelations about Zainab's marriage or any other matters concerning her death and the deaths of her family members.
He agreed to meet with a Whig-Standard reporter yesterday in his office at a Montreal store where he is an assistant manager but he would not allow any notes or photographs to be taken.
Several times Hyderi choked with emotion, breaking down once in tears.
On the bulletin board of his office is a picture of himself with a young woman with long, thick black hair that he identified as Zainab. Attached below it is a typed note professing his love for her.
In a prior phone interview, Hyderi said he and his family would tell their side of the story after an Aug. 6 court appearance for the three accused Shafias.
He said he has known the family since they arrived in Montreal two years ago.
"It's going to come out. It is going to come out, don't worry about it," Hyderi said, without explaining what he meant.
"I want to clear her name. I'm more concerned about Zainab than anyone else in this world."
