In one of those homicide cases, three men had already been charged by police before Iran spoke out. A man has now been charged in the second case. In the third case cited by Iran, the Iran Times can find no record of any murder.
Last Friday, police in Hamilton, Ontario, arrested Patrick Smith, 25, a sometime bartender and charged him with killing Elham Dashtirahmatabadi last May.
The police had announced in July that they were hunting for a young man filmed by security cameras pacing around a shop that the Iranian woman and her husband owned and in which she was found murdered.
The Hamilton Spectator reported Monday that someone had come forward and said the figure in the video looked like Smith. But the police said other people had come forward and identified others they thought they recognized in the video. The police said they spent months interviewing “hundreds” of people who looked like the figure in the surveillance tape.
The newspaper said Smith was originally from Vancouver and was listed by police as a “transient,” meaning he had no fixed address in the Hamilton area. He was arrested at a drug treatment center.
The shop operated by the Dashtirahmatabadis, who used the named Dashti in Canada, sold legal drug paraphernalia. The police have classified the crime as robbery suicide. They said Mrs. Dashti’s purse was missing from the shop after her murder and the cash register had been emptied
Detective Sergeant Ian Matthews of the Hamilton, Ontario, police said the mysterious young man was picked up by various video surveillance cameras starting at 11:30 a.m. He is seen pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the store. He is not seen after 2 p.m., the approximate time that Dashti-rahmatabadi was attacked inside the store and killed.
After scouring images from nu merous downtown surveillance cameras and eliminating dozens of possible suspects, detectives began searching in July for this one person caught over and over again.
The pictures show a man about 5-foot-9, with short, dark hair. He’s wearing a bright blue tee shirt with a logo on the front, a white baseball cap, white shoes and dark trousers. There is no clear view of his face, however.
The 31-year-old Iranian business owner, who ran the High Times drug paraphernalia shop with her husband, Mohammed, was found alone and mortally injured May 25. The attack was discovered when a customer entered the store and could not find anyone working. The customer flagged down a passing police cruiser and a uniformed officer found the woman, about two months pregnant with her second child, barely alive in the basement.
Two days later, she was taken off life-support and died.
The woman wore a headscarf and there was initial speculation the attack on her could have been a hate crime. But the police soon focused on robbery as the motive.
“We believe that this was a robbery during which excessive violence occurred,” said Matthews.
Without exception, customers, shopkeepers and friends told The Hamilton Spectator that Elham was a kind, loving and deeply religious Muslim woman who was adored by all. She had just begun telling people she was expecting a baby.
Her body was flown back to Iran for burial and her husband and their six-year-old daughter went there for the burial.
“Their daughter, she is asking ‘Why does God have to take my mother?’” said Vin Kapoor, a close family friend took care of their business affairs in the weeks after the murder. “Mohammed can’t come in the shop. I brought him in three or four times. He just cries.”
On the day of the attack, neighboring business owners said Elham had been stabbed. Kapoor, however, says she was beaten in the basement. Investigators have refused to make the autopsy results public, saying they are keeping that as “holdback information” that only the killer would know.
In High Times, shelves of elaborate bongs and colorful glass pipes fill the store along with incense, lighters, ashtrays, magazines devoted to hydroponic growing and packets of hookah herbs. Despite all the accessories that go along with drug use, Matthews said police have no reason to believe drugs were sold at the shop. “We have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing by the owners,” he says, however “somebody may have thought there were drugs inside.”
Hamilton is a city of a half million people located at the extreme western end of Lake Ontario not far from Toronto. Dashti-rahmatabadi’s murder was only the third homicide in the city last year.
The two other Canadian murders that concern Iran are those of Yazdan Ghiasi and Zohreh Ehsani.
Sixteen-year-old Ghiasi was shot dead in Ottawa December 6 and three Arabs were swiftly arrested and charged. A fourth Arab, who is believed to have actually fired the bullet that killed Ghiasi, is missing and assumed to have returned to the Middle East.
As for the case of Zohreh Ehsani, the Iran Times had conducted computer searches of Canadian newspapers but is unable to find any woman of that name, or similar names, listed as a homicide victim. Iran has cited her name but not said when or where in Canada she was killed.