Masum denies assault, trafficking charges

By Ian MacKay

Mohammad Masum testified and underwent cross-examination during three days last week in a provincial court trial at the Elks hall.

Masum, 43, formerly from Tisdale, denied ever touching the woman, whom he’s accused of sexually assaulting three times during late 2022 and early 2023, until he broke up an altercation between the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, and another employee in the Tisdale restaurant that Masum then owned.

He also denied that he’d ever employed the woman. She began dropping into the restaurant, usually in the afternoon, from two to four times a week to eat and look at the internet on her phone, he testified last week.

He turned the restaurant back to its previous owner about six months after business fell sharply when residents there learned that he’d been arrested for human trafficking and sexually assaulting the woman, Masum testified.

He’s a Canadian citizen who arrived here from Bangladesh in 2012 and now lives in Saskatoon with his second wife, he said. He has two children with both her and his first wife, whom he divorced in 2019, he said under cross-examination by Crown prosecutor Lesley Dunning on Friday.

Cross examination is to resume when the trial continues, scheduled during the morning of Nov. 24.

He’d agreed to house and feed the woman after receiving a request from Sohel Haider, formerly of Gull Lake and most recently from Elrose, Masum testified. Haider, 54, also faces a charge of human trafficking.

Pressed by Dunning about taking a stranger into his home where his wife and baby lived, Masum said his wife had agreed, as she was lonely, and later explained that many people helped him when he arrived in Canada.

He’d allowed her to move into a neighbouring apartment he rented in the same four-plex about three weeks after she arrived in Tisdale in mid-November 2022, he recalled. The male employee whom she later had the altercation with lived in that apartment. She wanted to move because the baby was keeping her awake, Masum said.

He’d recorded a soundless video on his phone, taken from his restaurant security system and shown during the trial, of the woman grabbing the other employee’s throat, then Masum breaking it up after taking a still photo with his phone. They’d argued over the employee choosing not to teach her how to use some restaurant equipment, Masum said.

He’d raped her twice in November 2022 and once in January 2023, the woman testified in September 2024. She’d also submitted to having sex with him at other times, she testified then.

She testified last May that she’d mainly kept quiet about the incidents because he showed her a video he’d made with his phone of them having sex and threatened to distribute it if she told anyone. However, she testified that she’d told Haider.

Saskatchewan Party MLAs Hugh Nerlien and Doug Steele, who’d met her working for Haider in a Gull Lake restaurant, testified before the summer that they’d helped her get away. She spent a couple of days in Elrose, where she was supposed to work at Haider’s cafe under a work permit she received in January 2023, she testified.

An immigrant services worker in Tisdale heard her story there, shortly before the complainant left in March 2023, decided it sounded like human trafficking, and arranged a place for her to stay at a women’s shelter in Swift Current. An employee of Steele’s drove to Elrose and took her there, court has heard.