Restaurant operators found guilty of human trafficking
By Ian MacKay
Two restaurant operators are to be sentenced in October after Judge Miguel Martinez found them guilty of human trafficking.
Police charged Sohel Haider, 55, and Mohammad Masum, 44, in July 2023. Judge Martinez also determined that Masum, who ran a restaurant in Tisdale, was guilty of three counts of sexual assault. The case involves a Bangladeshi woman whose identity is protected by court order. The men were jailed after the decision in Saskatoon provincial court on Aug. 7. They're to be sentenced on Oct. 22.
Their trial happened in Rosetown, starting in September 2024. Arguments and the decision took place in Saskatoon provincial court. A sentencing hearing and its outcome will also happen in the city.
Haider and Masum "took advantage of their authority as her employers and what I call their cultural authority as men to control and direct her movements," the judge said in his decision, according to CBC Saskatchewan.
"Both of them played on her fear of having to leave Canada," he said. "Largely, they did this by threatening to withhold or cancel her work permit or to report her to the authorities."
Both men denied she'd worked in their restaurants and Masum denied he'd sexually assaulted her. The woman testified in June 2025 that he'd blackmailed her into silence by showing her a video he'd recorded on his phone of a Nov. 20, 2022 incident, threatening to upload it to the internet and inform her husband, family and friends back in Bangladesh.
The woman came to Toronto on a visitor's visa in the summer of 2022, hoping to stay in Canada, her "dream country since childhood," she testified through an interpreter in September 2024. Testimony also occurred in October 2024 and May and June 2025.
She was hired to work 12 hours a day, six days a week, in Haider's Gull Lake restaurant. She wasn't trained as a cook but applied for a cook's position. She testified she was to be paid $1,000 a month and receive free room and board but rarely received money.
She was moved to Tisdale in October 2022. There, Masum, married with a young child, began raping her, she testified. She got a work permit in January 2023, flying to Arizona and returning to Edmonton to fulfil conditions. The permit indicated she was to work at Haider's Elrose restaurant.
She went there at her demand in late March 2023 but felt uncomfortable after Haider embraced her in the cold basement bedroom where she was to stay. She worked in the restaurant for two days before people she'd met earlier spirited her to a safe house.
Doug Steele, Hugh Nerlien and Jody (Armstrong) Campbell were involved in her rescue, carried out by Steele's executive assistant. Steele represents the Cypress Hills constituency for the Saskatchewan Party, and had met her in Gull Lake, Nerlien then represented Kelvington-Wadena, which bordered Tisdale, and Campbell worked with the Northeast Newcomer Services centre in Tisdale.
The Bangladeshi woman testified she fought Masum's advances before he raped her in his vehicle outside Tisdale on Nov. 20, 2022, but later that month submitted in a motel room during a shopping trip to Saskatoon and in Masum's vehicle at the side of the highway between Saskatoon and Tisdale in January 2023.
The case survived a Jordan application by the defence that the Crown had taken too much time to bring the case to court. Co-prosecutor Muhammad Zubair argued against quashing the charges, saying that the need for translation and the rarity of the charges in Saskatchewan helped make the case exceptional.