Canada ping!
Please FReepmail me to get on or off this ping list.
Posted on 06/06/2006 4:59:38 AM PDT by fanfan
The young men charged with plotting terrorist attacks against Canadian targets were allegedly planning two separate strikes -- one to detonate a truck bomb to destroy a significant building and the other to open fire on a crowd in a public place, the National Post has learned.
The conspirators were allegedly concentrating their efforts on their assigned missions and were in an advanced state of planning when authorities moved to arrest the men last weekend, sources said.
The national security component of the huge investigation was code-named Operation Claymore by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's spy agency, which was on specific alert as its office at the base of the CN Tower was allegedly among the list of prime targets.
The Toronto Stock Exchange was another of the plotters' possible targets for a massive bomb attack, according to law-enforcement sources.
Both attacks would have been devastating to the city of Toronto and, if carried out during business hours, significantly deadly.
Of the 17 people charged, five of them are considered juveniles by the court. Little information on the youths is publicly available regarding their charges.
Of the adults, documents filed in a Brampton, Ont., court suggest that a sub group of six was allegedly involved in the bomb plot.
Nine of them are also charged with training to carry out a terrorist activity.
A smaller group of four are charged with training or recruiting others into a terrorist plot, and three are charged with obtaining firearms.
All of them are charged with participating or contributing to a terrorist group.
The two men identified yesterday by the Post as the alleged terrorist leaders -- Fahim Ahmad, 21, and Zakaria Amara, 20 -- face the most charges. Mr. Ahmad, in fact, is the only one to be charged with all six of the terrorism charges.
Mr. Ahmad and Mr. Amara are joined in being charged with the bomb plot by Asad Ansari, 21, Shareef Abdelhaleem, 30, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, and Saad Khalid, 19.
Mr. Ahmad is also charged along with Mohammed Dirie, 22, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, with importing a firearm and ammunition for the benefit of a terrorist group and providing weapons to facilitate a terrorist activity.
Mr. Dirie and Mr. Mohamed were arrested for gun smuggling at the Peace Bridge in Fort Erie, Ont., last Aug. 13. They are incarcerated in separate Kingston prisons after earlier pleading guilty to gun offences.
Charged alongside Mr. Ahmad and Mr. Amara with recruiting or providing training to someone to participate in carrying out a terrorist activity are Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, and Steven Vikash Chand, 25, also known as Abdul Shakur, who converted to Islam from Hinduism.
All of the accused are expected to appear in court this morning. Security is expected to be intense. For their first appearance on Saturday, more than 30 tactical officers ringed the courthouse, a helicopter hovered overheard, and rooftop snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs watched those being frisked by court officers and Peel Regional Police officers.
Lawyers for a number of the accused men complained yesterday of the poor treatment their clients have been receiving since their arrest.
"My clients are being denied visits from their family. The family members are being denied access to them. I expected I will be able to get access to my clients after tomorrow's appearance," said Anser Farooq, a lawyer for at least three of the accused men.
Police seized firearms, computer hard drives, camouflage clothing, an electronic detonator and three tonnes of ammonium nitrate during raids that started on Friday.
The RCMP, which had been monitoring the group, switched a load of fertilizer -- which the conspirators allegedly believed to be 34-0-0 grade fertilizer, the best for making explosives -- with a benign substance before it was delivered to the suspects.
After the controlled delivery, heavily armed police fanned out throughout the Greater Toronto Area to arrest their targets.
The two men who were the alleged leaders, Mr. Ahmad and Mr. Amara, had been followers of Mr. Jamal, a senior member of the Ar-Rahman Islamic Centre in Mississauga. Six other of the accused also attended the Ar-Rahman centre. The facility, in a strip mall in Mississauga, was the focus of intense international media attention yesterday.
Canada ping!
Please FReepmail me to get on or off this ping list.
They were stopped thankfully.
This would have been a redux of Oklahoma City, only worse. Scumbags.
Open fire into a crowd?
B@st@rds!
And wasn't it just yesterday that LE in Canada swore the CN Tower was NOT a target? And the iman there is upset that these poor guys were the victims who were just out buying a few tons of fertilizer for what, their kitchen window herb garden?
Then, they will be handled in Court as if this was a common traffic accident.
As in Iraq, there is probably only one (1) way to stop this,
and it is neither by denial nor by such soft measures.
Yup.
Pathetic.
I'm going to get a shower.
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Canada is a magnet for the Slamo fascists thanks to its "liberal" immigration policies. Toronto is a beehive for Pakistani and Arab radicals. This thing was just waiting to happen.
In the past, Canada was host to a group of Sikh terrorists that blew up an Indian Airlines with 300 people on board. Not surprisingly they enjoy a life of luxury.
Message for the Canadians and the Eurabia. You reap what you sow.
The arrests mark a morphing of terrorism, from the well organized and funded attacks of 911 we have not moved into more of a free lance operation of folks with sympathy for the likes of Al Queda. These guys are more like amatuer's but they can be deadly and they will not be discovered by the type of intell we have gathered on other groups they will be found basically by luck and the lack of experience when they either try to recruit somebody who reports them or someone becomes suspicious when they try to order 6,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and they are not farmers.
Arrest the cops!
Sue the Canadian government!
/sarc
What's with all the "Mister" crap?
"In the past, Canada was host to a group of Sikh terrorists that blew up an Indian Airlines with 300 people on board. Not surprisingly they enjoy a life of luxury."
Yep - and in the meantime some in the media are calling for the death penalty, by lethal injection, to take place in Ft. Leavenworth, for our marines, who were fighting for us in that hell-hole of terrorists in Haditha and who haven't even been formally charged yet or put on trial or convicted (see the John Batchelor show).
I'll never listen to that show again.
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That amounts to real manliness to these insects.
I hope you two are OK up there! Be careful!
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