The Montreal woman accused in the killing of her three children and her husband's other wife was forced to explain Tuesday why video evidence appears to contradict her sworn testimony.
In earlier testimony, Tooba Yahya denied the Crown's claims that the women's deaths were primarily the result of the family patriarch's anger that his daughters had boyfriends.
Yahya said her husband, Mohammad Shafia, had forgiven 19-year-old Zainab for dating a boy, and had only found out that 17-year-old Sahar had a boyfriend when looking through a photo album he found in the younger girl's room on July 5 or 6, a week after their deaths.
Yahya had said that seeing the photos had made Shafia angry, which explains why in police wiretap evidence recorded a couple of weeks later he can be heard calling his daughters "treacherous" and "whores."
But Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis showed a CTV News report in court Tuesday that appeared to show Shafia looking through a similar photo album days before Yahya said it was found.
"Sir, if I show my home to you I have tons of albums that are all the same," she told Laarhuis.
Laarhuis pressed that point, asking Yahya how many photo albums with a princess on the cover the family had.
"One or two," she said. "We have many of those."
She continued to say the family had one, perhaps two, of the same album, suggesting Sahar had bought a matching pair because she had duplicates of the photos they contained.
But Laarhuis countered that if multiple albums with the same picture could be found in the home, Shafia must have seen the photos of Sahar with her boyfriend earlier than Yahya stated.
"Shafia would be seeing these pictures all the time," Laarhuis said, his voice rising in volume. "He would be ballistic."
Rona Mohammad, 52, and Shafia sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 were found dead in a car at the bottom of a Kingston canal on June 30, 2009.
Yahya, 42, Shafia, 58, and their eldest son, Hamed, 21, are accused of killing the four women over family honour.
All three have pleaded not guilty to the four-counts of first-degree murder.
The Montreal family had been heading home after a trip to Niagara Falls, Ont., when the family says the accident occurred. The Crown has alleged that the deaths were staged to look like their car accidentally plunged into the canal.
Yahya also testified Tuesday that she lied to police when she initially said she was at the scene where the women's bodies were found.
ahya said she made up the story of being at the Kingston Mills lock in Kingston, Ont. because she worried police would torture her son, the co-accused Hamed Shafia.
Yahya testified that she thought that if she placed herself at the scene then her son wouldn't come to harm.
"I was new to Canada," she testified. "In our country when someone was accused ... just to be charged they take his nails out."
The family moved to Canada in 2007 after spending 15 years in Pakistan, Dubai and Australia.
Crown prosecutors have alleged the girls were killed to restore family honour.
During his testimony, Shafia insisted that it was an "impossible" claim to suggest he would kill his own daughters.
On Tuesday, Yahya testified that she had never heard of honour killings before the women's deaths.
"Honour killing," she told court. "I heard that the time which they put that name to our case which is really shameful for us."
She said she had never before heard "of a stupid father or a stupid mother (doing) anything like this."
In her first day of testimony Monday, Yahya broke down when discussing her relationship with Rona Mohammad, the first woman her husband, Mohammad Shafia, married in Afghanistan.
Mohammad couldn't have children so Shafia took a second wife. Yahya said that while she was pregnant with her third baby, she promised Mohammad the child would be raised as her own.
