Free Republic

A young Mississauga man has pleaded guilty to intending to cause an explosion, the first time a member of the so-called Toronto 18 group has admitted the existence of a bomb plot. At a trial last year of a co-accused, prosecutors alleged some of the group's members were planning to bomb sites such as the Toronto Stock Exchange, RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, the Pickering nuclear power station and the Toronto offices of Canada's spy agency, located next to the CN Tower. In an unexpected move, Saad Khalid, 22, entered his plea on Monday but Justice Bruce Durno banned publication of...

Winds were howling, children were crying, one man was shouting and another stood paralyzed with fear, as a stalled elevator swayed 300 metres up the CN Tower. "After about 2 1/2 hours, we started to go up a few metres," passenger Irene Klee, visiting from Costa Rica, recounted yesterday of their ordeal Sunday aboard the glass-walled elevator. "Something was scratching the side – it sounded like steel against rock ... "We were all screaming. One of the small kids said he wanted to throw up. Then we dropped about five metres down." High winds trapped 17 people and buffeted them...

TORONTO - Luther Samuel, the man authorities say sold fraudulent school papers allowing members of a possible al-Qaeda sleeper cell to take root in Canada, long felt a duty to bring career training to the city's black community. When he purchased the Ottawa Business College, a private vocational school, in 1997, he quickly moved it from a downtown Ottawa address to a low-rent stretch of Scarborough to be close to the black and ethnic neighbourhoods he knew, former associates said. Within two years, however, his school had degenerated into a mere diploma mill, selling fraudulent documents and allowing 400 foreign...

Some in Ottawa know that Western nations are at war with terrorism. Sadly, others do not. The RCMP and its Public Security and Anti-Terrorism Unit know, as do CSIS and elements within Customs and Immigration Canada. Thanks to all three, 19 foreign "students" living in Canada -- 18 from Pakistan, one from India -- holding allegedly bogus documents and attending apparently sham post-secondary schools, have been detained. Authorities allege that several of them have connections to the al-Qaeda terror network and to false-front relief agencies that the United Nations has identified as financing conduits to terrorist groups in Pakistan and...

Ambitious terrorist plotters had better beware: Experts say the world's tallest free-standing structure is solid enough to foil any mastermind. Given its one-of-a-kind reinforced concrete construction, engineers who designed and built the CN Tower say it would not suffer the fate of the World Trade Center towers if it were attacked in the same way. "The most likely outcome is that the plane would shear apart and fall to the ground," said CN Tower president Bud Purves. "The tower was designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, earthquakes, fires, lightning strikes and more than 200 km/h winds --...

CREDIT: Chris Bolin, National Post Terror task force documents allege that "individuals had been involved in trying to find out the measurements, the schematics of major buildings in Canada like the CN Tower." Nineteen men have been arrested. TORONTO - Nineteen foreign students arrested by a federal anti-terrorism task force two weeks ago have possible connections to al-Qaeda and may have been scouting the CN Tower, law courts and other buildings, officials say. Canadian authorities claimed, in documents disclosed yesterday, that police raids had turned up material suggesting the men, 18 Pakistanis and an Indian, sought information about the...