link TORONTO - A group of Canadian residents arrested in coordinated raids across the Toronto area for ”terrorism-related offenses” had planned to blow up targets around southern Ontario, Canadian police said on Saturday. Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said the group had acquired three metric tons of ammonium nitrate — or three times the amount used in the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — as they sought to ”create explosive devices.” Police said they had arrested 12 adults and five young people. “This group posed a real and serious threat,” McDonnell said. “It had the capacity and intent to carry out attacks. Our investigation and arrests prevented the assembly of any bombs and the attacks being carried out.”Officials showed evidence of bomb making materials, a computer hard drive, camouflage uniforms and what appears to be a door with bullet holes in it at a news conference Saturday morning. “This group took steps to acquire three tons of ammonium nitrate and other components necessary to create explosive devices,” McDonell said. The arrests were made Friday, with some 400 officers involved. McDonell said the suspects were either citizens or residents of Canada and had trained together. “The men arrested yesterday are Canadian residents from a variety of backgrounds. For various reasons they appeared to have become adherents of a violent ideology inspired by al-Qaida,” said Luc Portelance, the assistant director of operations with CSIS — Canada’s spy agency. Heavily armed police officers ringed the Durham Regional Police Station in the city of Pickering, just east of Toronto, as the suspects were brought in late Friday night in unmarked cars which were drove into an underground garage. The Toronto Star reported Saturday that Canadian youths in their teens and 20s, upset at the treatment of Muslims worldwide, were among those arrested. The newspaper said they had trained at a camp north of Toronto and had plotted to attack CSIS’s downtown office near the CN Tower, among other targets. Melisa Leclerc, a spokeswoman for the federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, had no comment on the arrests. In March 2004, Ottawa software developer Mohammad Momin Khawaja became the first Canadian charged under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Act for alleged activities in Ottawa and London. Khawaja was also named, but not charged, in British for playing a role in a foiled bomb plot. He is being held in an Ottawa detention center, awaiting trial. The Canadian anti-terrorism law was passed swiftly following the Sept. 11 assaults, particularly after Osama bin-Laden’s named Canada one of five so-called Christian nations that should be targeted for acts of terror. The others, reaffirmed in 2004 by his al-Qaida network, were the United States, Britain, Spain and Australian, all of which have been victims of terrorist attacks. The anti-terrorism law permits the government to brand individuals and organizations as terrorists and gives police the power to make preventive arrests of people suspected of planning a terrorist attack. Though many view Canada as an unassuming neutral nation that has skirted terrorist attacks, it has suffered its share of aggression, including the 1985 Air India bombing, in which 329 people were killed, most of them Canadian citizens. Intelligence officials believe at least 50 terror groups now have some presence in the North American nation and have long complained that the country’s immigration laws and border security are too weak to weed out potential terrorists.
I just read about that. Pretty damn amazing that there are homegrown terrorists in Canada. I wonder how this is going to play out here? I can see a whole new wave of calls for more clampdowns on civil liberties.
now maybe they can nab the people running around putting fake news stories in the papers about iran too
i forgot the canadian government loves those fabricated anti-iran stories and so does the us govt, which recently invited the author of the fabricated dress code story, amir taheri, to the white house to give his 'honest' opinion on iran...what a joke
...Except that Canada caught them without clamping down on civil liberties indicating that you don't need to rip the rights from your citizens to catch bad people. You just need agencies that are on top of their game.
They caught them by monitoring web usage of Canadian citizens & legal residents and by intercepting international telephone calls & email made to & from same. We do not know exactly how the terrorists in the other countries were identified and tracked (datamining random phone records? keyword searching random email?) - and I would prefer that we *never* know how these suspects are identified, giving away our tricks seems to be a bad idea (see satellite phones). You simply do not know enough to say "US methods bad...Canada methods good". Well before police tactical teams began their sweeps around Toronto on Friday, at least 18 related arrests had already taken place in Canada, the United States, Britain, Bosnia, Denmark, Sweden, and Bangladesh. The six-month RCMP investigation, called Project OSage, is one of several overlapping probes that include an FBI case called Operation Northern Exposure and a British probe known as Operation Mazhar. ... The Toronto busts are linked to arrests that began last August at a Canadian border post near Niagara Falls and continued in October in Sarajevo, London and Scandinavia, and earlier this year in New York and Georgia. ... The intricate web of connections between Toronto, London, Atlanta, Sarajevo, Dhaka, and elsewhere illustrates the challenge confronting counter-terrorism investigators almost five years after 9/11. Linking the international probes are online communications, phone calls and in particular videotapes that authorities allege show some of the targets the young extremists considered blowing up. and The chain of events began two years ago, sparked by local teenagers roving through Internet sites, reading and espousing anti-Western sentiments and vowing to attack at home, in the name of oppressed Muslims here and abroad. Their words were sometimes encrypted, the Internet sites where they communicated allegedly restricted by passwords, but Canadian spies back in 2004 were reading them. And as the youths' words turned into actions, they began watching them. http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=de3f8e90-982a-47af-8e5e-a1366fd5d6cc&k=46849 http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...044&call_pageid=976163513378&col=969048863474 I would venture to guess that had 60 Minutes or whoever done an exposé on this behavior by US intelligence & law enforcement - without it being exposed in conjunction with a large successful terror investigation, as it's kind of hard to complain when it works - there would be mucho hysterics precisely regarding a "clamping down on civil liberties". Kudos to the various nations and agencies involved for an excellent job.
I agree which is why I said "how it will play out here". I can easily imagine how there are many who support things like the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, searching through people's phone records and tracking people's internet usage will say that since terrorist were caught in Canada the threat is closer than we think so we have to look more forcefully for the potential terrorists using every tool we can even if that means we have to bypass the courts to do it. Case in point:
