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Shafia Trial: English-French Snafu May Have Affected Case

Uniquely Canadian Snafu May Have Affected Case
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MONTREAL - There is word that a uniquely Canadian bureaucratic snafu occurred as the Shafia girls were seeking help from authorities three years ago.

Quebec child-protection officials tell The Canadian Press that case workers didn't have the full picture of what was going on in the household.

Youth protection is divided by language in Montreal, with one agency handling English complaints and the other handling French ones.

When the French-language agency received a complaint in April 2009, it didn't know that its English counterpart had investigated an earlier complaint by the Shafia sisters the previous year.

Until recently, there was no provincewide registry to help the different agencies share case information.

The head of youth protection at Montreal's English-language Batshaw agency says that if case workers had had details of the prior complaint, they might have treated the case differently.

A policy change is already in effect. A new Quebec-wide registry, which allows the sharing of information, was actually launched just one month after the Shafias' final complaint in 2009.

The Batshaw agency says it followed protocols, and has since conducted a widespread internal investigation into what happened in the Shafia case.

The bodies of Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti Shafia, along with Rona Amir Mohammad, were found in a car at the bottom of the Rideau Canal in Kingston on June 30, 2009. On Sunday, the three fellow members of the Montreal family were found guilty of four counts of first-degree murder.

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