A three-year search for a Spokane man accused of killing his wife and hiding her body in a freezer ended at a volleyball tournament in Europe last month, the Spokane County Sheriff's Office announced on Monday. Wahid Kashify is expected to stand trial on a first-degree murder charge in the May 2019 killing of his wife, Arezu. By the time authorities found Arezu's body at the couple's north Spokane apartment, Kashify had left the country for Afghanistan, where he has family. Detective Marc Melville, with the sheriff's office, says a video recovered from the alleged killer's phone showed a clear confession. Over the next three years, the sheriff's office worked with the FBI, Department of Justice, Interpol and the Department of Defense to find Kashify as he traveled between Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran and Europe. Melville says efforts to communicate with Kashify's family in Afghanistan were complicated by the collapse of the country's government in 2021. Last month, authorities were finally able to locate and arrest Kashify at a volleyball tournament in Europe. (The suspect is passionate about the sport, Melville says.) Kashify is now awaiting extradition in an undisclosed European country. (NATE SANFORD)
LOSING DOLLARS
The county's rental assistance strategy totally made sense: With all of these different pools of federal rental assistance money floating around with different deadlines, focus on spending the funds with the earlier deadlines first. So while Spokane County already distributed $37 million to help struggling renters, by August it had only spent 6 percent of the second "Emergency Rental Assistance" trove of Department of Treasury funds. That wasn't unreasonable: Supposedly, the deadline for spending the proposed $7.1 million was way in the future — September 2025. The strategy backfired. The Treasury announced that, because Spokane County hasn't spent that particular trove of rental assistance funding quickly enough, it's going to lose out on nearly $1 million in federal funding. "If we had a crystal ball, if we knew that they're going to move the goalposts on us, yeah, we could have come up with a different strategy," says Jared Webley, a county spokesman. (DANIEL WALTERS)
LOWS OF THE HEIGHTS
Hundreds of Washington State University students are still waiting to learn if and when they'll be able to move into brand new apartments they leased before the beginning of this school year. The Aspen Heights development in Pullman was delayed due to construction issues, but tenants were only told just before the school year started in August that they'd need to find alternative housing until October, while still being stuck in their leases for the unfinished units, according to reporting from WSU's student-led paper the Daily Evergreen. The move-in has further been delayed, as some students might be able to move in near the end of November, according to the Evergreen. (SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL) ♦
