The jury in the Farah Khan case on Thursday found the five-year-old girl's father guilty of first-degree murder and her stepmother guilty of second-degree murder.

After a day and a half of deliberations, the jury concluded that Muhammad Arsal Khan premeditated his daughter's death in 1999. He faces an automatic sentence of life in prison with no parole for 25 years.

They found Farah's stepmother, Kaneez Fatima, guilty because she did not do enough to stop Khan from killing the girl. She faces a minimum of 10 years in jail.

Muhammad Arsal Khan and Kaneez Fatima (file photo)
Muhammad Arsal Khan and Kaneez Fatima (file photo)

Khan and Fatima were both charged with first-degree murder. They both pleaded not guilty. The couple has since divorced.

The trial has been front-page news for months. Justice David Watt told the jury to ignore what they may have heard about the trial in the media and to try to ignore any personal feelings they may have.

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Watt also explained to the jury the differences between first-degree murder, second-degree murder and manslaughter before they began deliberations on Wednesday.

During the trial, the Crown painted a picture of Muhammad Khan, 40, as a violent man who hated his daughter because he suspected she was not his biological child.

Kaneez Fatima, 49, had been cast as a passive woman who was terrorized by her former husband. Fatima's lawyer, John Collins, told the court that his client had been a caring stepmother to Farah, but was forced by Khan to help dispose of the girl's body.

Crown attorney David Fisher told the court that Khan plotted his daughter's murder before the family immigrated to Canada in the spring of 1999. He said Khan brought surgical instruments with him when he moved here from Pakistan, which he later used to dismember the girl.

Khan's lawyer, Todd Ducharme, had urged the jurors to find Khan guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter, saying he had inadvertently killed the little girl while beating her in a fit of rage, then panicked and hid the body to conceal her accidental death.

That scenario was contradicted by six prosecution witnesses, who testified that Khan had admitted killing the girl by cutting her throat.

Following his arrest, Khan initially told police that Farah had committed suicide, a suggestion that his own lawyer called "the stupidest, most transparent lie in the history of Anglo-Canadian law."

Parts of Farah's body were found at a lakeshore park in Toronto's west end in December 1999, after a witness saw two people – later identified as Khan and Fatima – attempting to hide a garbage bag there. The remains were later identified as Farah's and her father and stepmother were arrested the following month.

The Khan family came to Canada from Pakistan in August 1999 and by December 1999 Farah was dead.