Court hears bland chat turn bloody
It might have been an episode of Seinfeld in Arabic.
A TV show famously about nothing. A loopy conversation about nothing much — until the sudden segue to poisoning Western troops at a military base in Afghanistan and derailing a Via passenger train in Canada.
But it began as “Chiheb And Tamer Go To Toronto”: A bromance.
Chiheb Esseghaier and Tamer el-Noury: The accused terrorist and the undercover FBI agent.
On Sept. 8, 2012, el-Noury got behind the wheel of a rental car in Montreal, bound for Toronto with the PhD bio-nanotechnology student as his passenger. Unbeknownst to Esseghaier, the entirety of their chatter over the next six-plus hours was being surreptitiously audiotaped, with the agent wearing a body-pack.
They discussed all matter of minutiae, in the effusive and arabesque linguistic manner common in Muslim discourse, shot through with “Allah be praised” and “Peace be upon you” and “God willing habibi” (Arabic for “my darling,” as Esseghaier repeatedly addresses elNoury) — even when the topic is mass murder, a jarring juxtaposition of elegant speech and barbarous subject.
But before getting to the core of the thing — an alleged terrorist plot and where the agent clearly wanted to steer the conversation — they laughed it up uproariously, giggling over a semantic joke, a misunderstanding deriving from the difference between what the same word meant in Tunisian Arabic (boat) and Egyptian Arabic (duck).
Esseghaier hails from Tunisia. The agent was pretending to be a nativeborn American partly raised in Egypt who had been radicalized by an Islamic uncle following the death of his mother — details larded into the background “legend” he’d spun since the two men met on a plane departing from Houston several months earlier, a meeting that was clearly not coincidental, although the genesis of this entire covert operation have not been revealed.
Esseghaier was arrested by the RCMP in April 2013, charged with five terrorism-related offences arising from an alleged plot to derail a VIA train travelling from Toronto to New York City. A not-guilty plea has been entered on his behalf after he refused to plead either way. His co-accused, Raed Jaser, a Palestinian from Dubai, has pleaded not guilty to four terrorism charges in the jury trial which began in a Toronto courtroom Monday.
Esseghaier and el-Noury were on their way to Toronto to meet Jaser on that September day. The agent’s only dealings up to that point had been with Esseghaier, a friendship that had flourished after spending five evenings together socially in Santa Clara, where Esseghaier had been attending a business conference. They had bonded quickly over a shared radical Islamic ideology and a mutual loathing — feigned on el-Noury’s part — of the West’s military presence in Muslim lands.
“Canada is more beautiful in your presence,” a delighted Esseghaier said with his over-the-top amity.
The agent played his role to the hilt, as he explained to Crown attorney Sarah Shaikh, during one of the few live exchanges he had on the witness stand Tuesday, a day devoted almost entirely to the playing of audio recordings from the Montreal-to-Toronto road trip. “It was imperative that I gain his trust to show I had the same mindset.”
Before they got to the plot-crunch, the two men exchanged their dim view of Canadian society, which allows men and women to have multiple sexual partners outside of marriage but forbids Muslim males to take more than one spouse, as is permitted by their faith.
“They put him in jail,” complains Esseghaier. “They kick him out of the country . . . Is it fair? . . . You have to take care of (your wives) financially, emotionally, because what’s written in the Koran.
“Here, they don’t care, they don’t want any of that legal stuff, no. Girlfriend, have as many as you want, it doesn’t matter, there is no legal commitment, of course.”
Esseghaier eventually talks about serving the Islamist cause. He introduces the subject of Al Massoul — “The Responsible One” — an Islamic leader he appears to have met during trips he’d made to the Iran-Afghanistan border. It is this individual who promoted the idea of arranging for a Muslim cook to poison troops at an overseas base.
Esseghaier says he’s tried to find such a cook but so far had only succeeded in befriending a chef at a Montreal hotel. “I started talking to him little by little until I took him to the point . . . ‘it’s possible that you have friends, that you have colleagues, like . . . if you place poison in food, everything is done.’ ”
A preferable scheme, Esseghaier observes, to grabbing a pistol and shooting. “They’ll shoot you back and you’ll die.”
The hotel cook in question then stopped taking his calls.
Esseghaier argues that attacking a bridge over land, not water, would be best, causing more casualties
The agent warns Esseghaier about taking others into his confidence. “I learned when I was still young, especially the Americans and the disbelievers who are here — be alert, no matter what else, unless he is a Muslim that you know and you trust.”
Yet Esseghaier apparently has no wariness about el-Noury, though he’s nervous about telling Raed Jaser that he let his new friend in on the plan. The alleged plot with his “brother from Palestine”: Using jackhammers to carve out a five- to six-metre hole in a railway bridge, shortly before the Maple Leaf train was scheduled to pass over it.
The agent, who had passed himself off as a real estate developer, says he can secure the equipment needed through his company. He could also assist in posting a video online where the plot participants would make it clear the catastrophe had been no accident. The objective was to create such a panic that both Canada and the U.S. would withdraw their troops from Afghanistan.
Esseghaier and Jaser, court heard in the Crown’s opening address Monday, had already scouted out possible bridge targets. Esseghaier argues that a bridge over land, rather than water, would be best, causing more casualties. “Many people will die. It’s very simple idea. There is no missile, there is nothing.”
But Esseghaier obviously has little understanding of either the structural expertise required for this operation or what makes a train run. He speculates, quite giddily, that with the “gas” inside the train igniting, “the train itself will become (a) bomb.” And the train attack — in December, he’s thinking — was but one of the terrorist schemes he and Jaser had been allegedly concocting.
“This mission, it’s just beginning,” Esseghaier says the video will declare. “If you don’t get out from our land we will do more and more. And it will be, God willing, very good for us.”
The trial continues. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.