There isn’t much evidence that’s in dispute at the trial of Hamid Ayoub.
Both sides agree that on June 15, 2021, he parked his car near the home his estranged wife shared with their two children, about 20 minutes after getting an email from a tracking device he had hidden months earlier on a vehicle used by the children.
Surveillance video captured him walking to the scene.
With murderous intent — and after years of physical and emotional abuse that caused his family to leave him and call 911 multiple times — he stabbed his ex Hanadi Mohamed 39 times in broad daylight on busy Baseline Road.
Then he turned the knife on their 22-year-old daughter, stabbing her 12 times before jogging back to his car and driving away.
He was arrested hours later at The Ottawa Hospital’s General campus while seeking treatment for a cut he sustained during the attack.
All of it happened. There’s no debate.
1st or 2nd-degree murder?
What the jury will have to decide starting next week is whether Ayoub’s murder of Mohamed was planned and deliberate, or committed amid a pattern of criminal harassment — the two routes to first-degree murder the Crown is arguing for — or, as the defence contends, an impulsive explosion of rage and violence that favours a finding of guilt for second-degree murder.
As for the attack on his daughter, the jury has to decide whether to accept the Crown’s theory that Ayoub meant to kill her (attempted murder), or the defence theory that he was enraged when she tried to stop him from killing her mother (aggravated assault).
Ayoub, 63, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and attempted murder in Ottawa Superior Court at the beginning of his trial on Sept. 16.
Crown prosecutors Louise Tansey and Cecilia Bouzane rejected his guilty pleas to the lesser charges.
An Ottawa police acting sergeant testified las week that she didn’t end up charging Ayoub after a report that he had held a knife to his wife’s neck in 2013 because Mohamed didn’t want her to, despite a rule that police have to lay charges in domestic cases regardless of what victims want. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
The Crown’s position
Thirteen years after arriving in Canada, Mohamed “did something very brave” by leaving Ayoub for good in August 2020 — packing up with her daughter and telling no one where they were going, Tansey told the jury Thursday morning.
The secrecy caused Ayoub to take the “drastic step” of surreptitiously tracking the car used by his children, starting Nov. 3, 2020. He watched and watched and watched, Tansey said, setting the device to tell him its location 68 times from November to the day of the attack.
“The knife is the murder weapon. The [tracking device] is the beacon that led Mr. Ayoub right to his victims,” Tansey said.
When Ayoub approached Mohamed near her home on May 19, 2021, about a month before the attack, and told her that she left the house, took the kids, and that he knew where she lived, he was “besetting” her with threatening conduct.
And he beset her again the day of the murder when he parked nearby, armed himself, approached and attacked without saying a word, Tansey argued.
The jury is expected to begin deliberations at the Ottawa courthouse next week. (Matthew Kupfer/CBC)
As for his attack on his daughter, Ayoub knew that one of the children who abandoned him would be there. His attack on her never wavered, and “ended only when she played dead,” Tansey said.
Afterward, he didn’t go home. He changed his clothes, tossed the knife (which was never found), and made an 18-minute international call. His vehicle was stocked “with everything he needed.”
His backpack contained toiletries, prescriptions, chargers and devices, along with more than $5,000 US and more than $3,000 Cdn — “a huge amount of money by anyone’s standards, more so for someone receiving social assistance.”
“What he didn’t plan for was injuring himself,” Tansey told the jury. So Ayoub went to the hospital, turned off his phone, lied about how he was hurt and waited for treatment until his arrest.
The defence position
Leonardo Russomanno, speaking on behalf of himself and co-defence counsel Omar Abou El Hassan, implored the jury to set aside any prejudice against Ayoub for being “an angry, hurtful and abusive man” who repeatedly victimized his family, and to think critically about the Crown’s theories.
Ayoub used the “getaway bag” for school in Brockville, Ont., and “kept everything” in it, including years-old receipts and garbage, Russomanno said. “No one is going anywhere with an expired passport and half a smoked joint in their bag.”
He was also known to carry cash on previous trips to Sudan, and believed he’d be going to Sudan with his kids that summer.
He wanted to be part of their lives, but killing their mother wouldn’t help them reconcile. That indicates that the murder was impulsive, Russomanno argued.
He posited that Ayoub was tracking his son, that there were more secluded places near Mohamed’s home that he could have attacked, that he made no effort to conceal his identity, that he always had extra clothes for travel to Brockville, and that when he approached Mohamed a month before the murder, his focus was his children, not her.
Regarding the stabbing of his daughter, Russomanno argued Ayoub’s rage switched from Mohamed, his intended target, to his daughter when she heroically intervened. And he pointed out that Ayoub called his daughter after the attack.
In closing, Russomanno argued there was no separate and distinct act of criminal harassment on the day of the attack — that Ayoub’s arrival at the scene was part of the murder, not part of a pattern of harassment.
The jury is expected to hear instructions from the judge on Monday before deliberations begin.