Canada Bust Terrorists In Toronto

Via AP

Seventeen Canadian residents were in custody Saturday on terrorism- related charges, including plots to use explosives in attacks on Canadian soil, authorities said.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said they arrested 12 male adults and five youth and foiled plans for terrorist attacks against targets in southern Ontario.

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,” said assistant Royal Canadian Mounted Police commissioner Mike McDonell said.

McDonell said that is three times the amount used to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

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.

It may be interesting to some of you on the method used to catch these dangerous individuals. It was a highly effective method that many in America would claim violates privacy. They actually monitored internet activity!!!!

The investigation began back in 2004, when CSIS was monitoring Internet sites and tracing the paths of Canadians believed to have ties to international terrorist organizations. Local youths espousing fundamentalist views drew special attention, sources say.

Snip

Four months after authorities began to fear that Canada might have its own homegrown terrorist cell, two Americans entered the picture.

Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi descent who had attended high school in Ontario, and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a student at Georgia Tech, boarded a Greyhound bus in Atlanta on March 6, 2005, and travelled to Toronto to meet “like-minded Islamic extremists,” a U.S. court document alleges.

At the time the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was watching the U.S. pair, Sadequee, according to court documents, was already on a no-fly list. But they crossed the border uneventfully and met three people associated with the group the Canadian authorities were watching.

This is why we need to secure ALL of our borders, and have absolute coordination of information between us and our allies. When groups like the ACLU applaud the loss of information sharing, we are sadly going down the wrong path. We are headed down the dangerous road of putting common sense and security in the back seat.

The Captain says it short, simple, and bluntly:

If we want to catch these people before they strike, then we had better know when, where, and how they communicate for coordination and recruitment, and be prepared to stop them as the CSIS has apparently done today.

Toronto Star lists the names:

1. Fahim Ahmad, 21, Toronto;

2. Zakaria Amara, 20, Mississauga, Ont.;

3. Asad Ansari, 21, Mississauga;

4. Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30, Mississauga;

5. Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, Mississauga;

6. Mohammed Dirie, 22, Kingston, Ont.;

7. Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24, Kingston;

8. Jahmaal James, 23, Toronto;

9. Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19, Toronto;

10. Steven Vikash Chand alias Abdul Shakur, 25, Toronto;

11. Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21, Mississauga;

12. Saad Khalid, 19, of Eclipse Avenue, Mississauga.

Lots more info at Counterterrorism Blog
Captain’s Quarters
Michelle Malkin has a roundup.
So does Pajama’s Media
Barcepundit is all over the story as well.
Others: My Pet Jawa
Don Surber
Blue Crab Boulevard
OTB
Lawhawk
Bright and Early
Hot Air
Small Dead Animals is liveblogging all the developments.
Atlass Shrugs has a message for Russ Feingold.
Texas Rainmaker notices other parallels.
Update: FOX News is reporting that the FBI is investigating possible ties between these Canadian terror suspects with two other suspects in America from Georgia. Dan Riehl has more info on this.
Update: an attack was immenent, and the plot involved six other countries.

The recent discovery of a transnational terrorist network anchored in Sarajevo—and with branches in Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom—is further evidence of the extent to which the jihad in Bosnia still influences Western European mujahideen networks. Last fall, Bosnian authorities announced a series of arrests in connection with a security sweep known as Operation Mazhar. The men taken into custody had purchased explosives and allegedly planned to carry out suicide attacks against Western targets across Europe. The leader of the cell, Swedish national Mirsad Bektasevic (a.k.a. “Maximus”) was initially based in Sweden and then traveled on to Bosnia “to plan an attack aimed at forcing Bosnia or another government to withdraw forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.”…

Dan Riehl has all the details.