Published: September 24, 2008
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/world/americas/25canada.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
BRAMPTON, Ontario — The story
that first emerged about the 18 men and teenagers, all Muslims,
who were arrested in and around Toronto in June 2006, was deeply
disturbing. Police officials and prosecutors told of plots to bomb
government offices in Toronto and Ottawa as well as a nuclear
power station, and of a planned attack on Parliament with the aim
of capturing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and decapitating him.
But as a judge in this Toronto
suburb prepares to release the verdict on Thursday in the first
trial of a member of the Toronto 18, as the accused have come to
be known, the group has taken on a less sinister cast.
Charges were dropped this year
against seven of the defendants. And evidence presented at the
first trial suggests that the group was long on inflammatory talk
about plots but short on the means and methods to carry them out,
and that it was aided — and perhaps provoked — by paid police
informants.
From the first terrifying charges
outlined by prosecutors to the gritty, often comically deflated
details that have emerged in court, the case of the Toronto 18
seems to fit a well-established pattern in terrorism prosecutions.
Whether the result of trumped-up charges, conflicting demands of
intelligence agencies or difficulties of trying cases where
evidence is withheld by governments looking to protect their
sources and methods, numerous terrorism trials in the United
States and Europe have similarly foundered over the years.
This month, for example, a London
jury dealt a blow to counterterrorism officials when it convicted
three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder but
failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a
conspiracy to blow up seven airliners with liquid explosives.
While no expert observer is
willing to forecast this week’s verdict, many agree that the
Toronto 18 may be more a gang that could not shoot straight than
Canada’s first serious homegrown terrorist threat since a
group of Quebec separatists kidnapped a British diplomat and
kidnapped and killed a provincial cabinet minister in 1970.
“There was certainly a portrait
drawn of this being a serious terrorist cell involving a large
number of individuals who had bloodthirsty objectives,” said
Wesley Wark, of the Munk Center for International Studies at the
University of Toronto. “We didn’t get a chance to assess those
claims until this trial. Then things became instantly much
murkier.”
Because the man on trial was 17
years old when arrested, he cannot be identified under Canadian
law. But evidence presented in court made it clear that, at best,
he was a minor character in the group, one who appears to have
been more interested in chopping firewood than in jihad.
No matter how minor his role,
though, the evidence presented in the case presents a broad
picture of the months leading to the raids, which, the police
said, were timed to prevent the group from acquiring fertilizer to
create bombs. The evidence was so broad that a court order
prevents the publication of the identities of other people
described in it to avoid prejudicing later trials.
The man, who was accused of
participating in terrorist training, moved to Canada from Sri
Lanka in 1994 and was raised a Hindu. He converted to Islam in
high school and met many of his accused accomplices, including a
man prosecutors depict as the ringleader, at a mosque in the
Scarborough area of Toronto.
But there was no evidence offered
directly linking the defendant to the bomb plot or plans to storm
Parliament. Instead, most of the case focused on his attendance at
two camps that the police described as terrorist training sessions
but that prosecution witnesses characterized as recreational or
religious retreats. Both were videotaped by a paid police
informant who was part of the group and who testified that he
choreographed some of the scenes.
Video from a camp north of
Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby,
snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as
special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said
it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter
pastime of young Canadian motorists. Other video from the camp
shows paintball fights, military clothing and members marching
with a group flag.
Video from a second camp shows
participants trying to ford a small stream by walking across logs
(many of them fell in), sitting in a circle around two machetes
(both apparently dull) and a book on the floor of a tent in what
witnesses said was a bid to mimic online Islamic videos, and
people jumping over a campfire.
Inexperienced at camping and not
fond of the cold, the participants at the winter camp spent much
of their time retreating to the heat of a nearby outlet of Tim
Hortons, the ubiquitous Canadian coffee shop chain. Both camps
provoked reports of suspicious activity to local police officers
who, at one point, roused a group of campers who were sleeping in
a van.
But a handgun was used for target
practice at the winter camp. Wiretaps and evidence from two
witnesses who were at the camp also show that inflammatory, if
sometimes cryptic, remarks were made, particularly by the alleged
ringleader, who regularly preached about the need for young
Muslims to avenge attacks on their faith and its homelands.
But whether most of the campers
knew anything about targets in Canada is, at best, unclear.
Conversations about bombings and attacking Parliament appeared to
involve only a small subset of the group. They showed little
planning. When discussing the attack on Parliament, the group
debated whether the prime minister was Mr. Harper or, as one
suspect put it, “Paul — um what’s his name — Paul loser,”
apparently a reference to
Paul Martin, the Liberal whom Mr. Harper defeated.
One of the suspects suggested
during the talk that the current defendant, who was not part of
that conversation, should cut off Mr. Harper’s head because he was
the only camper who had shown interest in cutting firewood.
In his closing arguments, the
prosecutor, John Neander, cited the suspected ringleader’s
repeated calls for the destruction of “Rome” as evidence that the
defendant should have known the group planned attacks in Canada.
(Although one witness testified that when some of the youths at
the second camp complained about Canada, he reminded them about
the quality of its roads, schools and health care system.)
Whatever its motives, the group
was able to attend both camps thanks in part to Mubain Shaikh, the
police informer, who was paid nearly $300,000 to infiltrate it.
Mr. Shaikh provided a vehicle to transport the participants (it
was wired by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and participated
enthusiastically in the most incendiary discussions. According to
a defense filing related to another suspect’s case, he provided
the 9-millimeter handgun used at the first camp (a claim not
disputed by prosecutors). He later purchased a rifle and
ammunition at the request of the ringleader.
Mr. Shaikh, who pleaded guilty in
July to threatening physical harm to two 12-year-old girls, was by
far the most colorful witness at the trial. But he frustrated the
government. Mr. Neander repeatedly clashed with him over his view
that the group, including the defendant, were not any sort of
threat.
“It was obvious to me from Day 1
that I didn’t have to keep too much of an eye on them,” Mr. Shaikh
testified about the younger members. “They were sheep.
Nonentities.” He described the apparent leader as being “a few
fries short of a Happy Meal” and declared his plans to be merely a
“jihadi fantasy.”
Whatever the outcome of the
current trial, said Faisal Kutty, the general counsel for the
Canadian-Muslim Civil Liberties Association, police and national
security agencies have lost the trust of many Muslims in Toronto.
“They’ve gone from one plus one equals two to one plus one equals
five,” said Mr. Kutty, who is not defending any of the suspects.
“We’re not questioning their right to try these individuals, if
there’s evidence. But there is an ethical issue here about taking
troubled young teens who had certain beliefs and thoughts and then
sending in someone who is young and charismatic to egg them on.”
