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17 arrested in Canada terror plot
3 tons of bomb ingredients; police say Ontario sites targeted
- Ian Austen, David Johnston, New York Times
Sunday, June 4, 2006
Ottawa -- Seventeen Canadian residents were arrested and charged with plotting to attack targets in southern Ontario with crude but powerful fertilizer bombs, the Canadian authorities said Saturday.
The arrests represented one of the largest counterterrorism sweeps in North America since the attacks of September 2001. American officials said the plot did not involve any targets in the United States, but added that the full dimension of the alleged attack was unknown.
At a news conference in Toronto, home to at least six suspects, police and intelligence officials said they had been monitoring the group for some time and moved in to make the arrests Friday after the group arranged to take delivery of three tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be made into an explosive when combined with fuel oil.
"It was their intent to use it for a terrorist attack," said Mike McDonell, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police assistant commissioner. He said that by comparison the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people was carried out "with only 1 ton of ammonium nitrate."
The 17 men were mainly of South Asian descent, and most were in their teens or early 20s. The oldest was 43 years old, police officials said.
"They represent the broad strata of our society," McDonell said. "Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed."
Authorities did not give a motive for the alleged plot. None of the suspects had any known affiliation with al Qaeda. Canada has not sent troops to Iraq, and officials at the news conference said they did not believe the group was angry over Canada's deployment of troops to Afghanistan.
The Canadian police declined to identify specific targets, though they did dismiss media reports that Toronto's subway system was on the list. The Toronto Star, citing an unidentified source, said the group had a list that included the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa as well as the Toronto branch office of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. At the news conference, officials emphasized that the targets were all in Canada.
In the United States, the arrests reignited fears among counterterrorism officials about the porous northern border, even as the Bush administration and lawmakers have focused attention in recent weeks about hardening the southern border in an effort to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants.
Since the arrest of Ahmed Ressam in December 1999, as he tried to smuggle explosive chemicals into Washington state in a plot to strike targets that included the Los Angeles international airport, authorities have expressed fears that extremists could use Canada as a platform to make attacks inside the United States.
Counterterrorism officials said interviews with suspects would provide greater clarity about the nature of the plot, but they said the men had taken a significant step, moving beyond the planning stage, toward acquiring a large quantity of potentially explosive fertilizer.
American officials said that White House officials were briefed on the case in recent days and that counterterrorism agencies were in contact with Canadian authorities who warned them of the arrests.
One senior counterterrorism official said there had been extensive contact between U.S. and Canadian authorities in the past several days. Though there appeared to have been no direct threat inside the United States, the proximity of the potential terrorists to the border "really got everybody's attention," the official said.
U.S. officials were granted anonymity because they were speaking about a continuing investigation.
The FBI issued a statement Saturday saying there was a "preliminary indication" that some of the Canadian subjects might have had "limited contact" with two people from Georgia who were recently arrested. Those two were Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, an American of Bangladeshi descent, and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a Pakistani-born American.
Law-enforcement officials said they had made "casing" videos of various sites in Washington, D.C., and have said that their case was linked to the arrests of several men in Britain last fall, and that the two were believed to have met with "like-minded Islamic extremists" in Canada in March 2005.
A counterterrorism official in the United States said that while there was contact between the Georgia men earlier this year and those arrested in Canada, there was no evidence that the Georgia suspects were involved in the bombing plot.
The suspects were arrested in a series of raids that began late Friday night and continued until early Saturday morning in Toronto, the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, and Kingston, a college town southwest of Ottawa.
All of the men under arrest were taken to a heavily fortified police station in Pickering, Ontario, a city east of Toronto. Five were under the age of 18 and not identified by the authorities. The others were identified as Fahim Ahmad, 21; Zakaria Amara, 20; Asad Ansari, 21; Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30; Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43; Mohammed Dirie, 22; Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24; Jahmaal James, 23; Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19; Steven Vikash Chand, alias Abdul Shakur, 25; Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21; and Saad Khalid, 19.
Anser Farooq, a lawyer from Mississauga who is representing five of the defendants, said a lack of information at Saturday's court hearing made it difficult to assess the case brought by the police.
In court, he said, government lawyers broke with tradition and did not present a synopsis of the reasons for their charges, arguing that they had not had time to prepare it. It will, however, be presented at a hearing Tuesday.
Both the police and a spokeswoman for the intelligence agency declined to say when they first became aware of the Canadian group. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Mayor David Miller of Toronto said he was given a confidential briefing about the group several months ago.
The alleged plotters operated what the police called training camps for its members. At their news conference, the police displayed at least one pistol, electronics components, military fatigues, army-style boots and two-way radios they said were used at the camps, although they would not disclose their location.
All but two of the adult suspects appeared at a court north of Toronto in Brampton, Ontario, on Saturday afternoon. By late morning, all entrances to the Brampton courthouse were blockaded by steel barriers and police cars. As snipers watched from nearby rooftops, people entering the court were required to remove their shoes and were searched at a series of three command checkpoints by tactical officers carrying heavy weapons and accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs.
Alvin Chand, the brother of suspect Steven Vikash Chand, dismissed the police allegations outside the courthouse.
"He's not a terrorist, come on, he's a Canadian citizen," Chand told the Canadian Press. "The people that were arrested are good people. They go to the mosque. They go to school, go to college."
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