Human Trafficking Trial: Masum testifies about complainant’s movements and behaviour

By Ian MacKay

Prosecutors learned more about Mohammad Masum’s dealings with a woman he’s accused of raping three times in 2022 and 2023, but little that appeared to help their case, while finishing their cross-examination of the man last week.

The trial of Masum and Sohel Haider resumed on Nov. 24 after about a three-week break. They’re both charged with human trafficking. It’s scheduled to continue on Jan. 13 with another defence witness.

Masum continued to maintain that the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, wasn’t hired to work at his restaurant in Tisdale when he brought her to the town in November 2022 at Haider’s request.

She’d served coffee to a “friend” whom she’d told Masum would visit the restaurant one day in March 2023. He watched their table on a security monitor from the kitchen, where he was cooking, after another employee complained, Masum told Crown prosecutor Lesley Dunning.

He “could see everything,” he testified, including that the man, identified earlier in the trial as former Kelvington-Wadena MLA Hugh Nerlien, gave her something.

Masum later asked her what the man gave her, and the complainant denied receiving anything from him until he told her he’d watched the interaction on the monitor. It contained contact information for a Tisdale immigration settlement worker, who testified earlier in the trial that what the woman told her sounded like human trafficking—but the complainant told him she’d torn it up and flushed it down the toilet. He replied that he hadn’t seen her go to the washroom, Masum testified.

“Everything was changed” after the man’s visit, he said.

He started to drive her to Elrose, where she was supposed to work under a work permit she’d received in mid-January, the day after she’d attacked the other employee physically. She’d grabbed the man around the neck after an argument over teaching her to use the restaurant’s debit machine. Judge Miguel Martinez saw the episode in a video Masum recorded from his security system after the incident, which happened around Feb. 1, 2023, the accused recalled.

However, they left Tisdale before she’d apologized in person to the other employee, and she began screaming about going back to apologize to him and trying to jump out of the moving vehicle, so he turned around at Wakaw, he said.

He’d tried to take her to Elrose on the following “four or five” Mondays, the day the restaurant was closed, but she always had an excuse not to go, he indicated.

He testified that she also started “screaming” about not wanting to go to Elrose when they were almost at the town and complained to Haider when they arrived. Haider told her that he’d told Masum to bring her there, the accused testified.

Asked by Dunning why he put up with behaviour that Masum admitted had annoyed him, he said that since Haider had asked him to take care of her, in Bengali culture, when someone asks that, “We have a responsibility to take care of everything.”

Haider had no job or room for her in Gull Lake, her initial Saskatchewan destination after she applied for work as a cook at his restaurant while lacking cooking credentials or knowledge about preparing Canadian dishes, the trial has heard.

She spent a couple of days in Elrose, starting to spend the first night in a cold basement until she called Haider and he sent someone with a blanket and a portable heater, the woman testified, before an aide to Cypress Hills MLA Doug Steele arrived one morning to take her to a women’s shelter.