Phones seized in murder case linked to T.O. mayor
TORONTO — Toronto police investigating the fatal shooting of Anthony Smith — a Toronto gang member whose photograph has been linked to the crack video allegations dogging Toronto Mayor Rob Ford — seized four cellphones from one of Smith’s accused killers, court documents reveal.
Search warrant information, released Friday to a media coalition that includes Postmedia Network, confirms police entered a Fort McMurray, address linked to Hanad Mohamed in search of a black iPhone. But they also found a black Samsung cellphone, a black BlackBerry and a white iPhone with a broken screen, among other items including a small quantity of marijuana and a bus ticket.
Nothing in the documents reveals what was on the phones. The case has generated intense public interest, primarily because Smith was pictured in a photograph with Ford outside a reputed Toronto crack house, where drug dealers allegedly filmed a cellphone video of the mayor smoking a substance that appeared to be crack cocaine.
The mayor has denied the accusations and the National Post has never seen the alleged video.
Media lawyer Peter Jacobsen, who spent much of Friday arguing for access, said while there was no mention of Ford in the lightly redacted warrant documents, “We wouldn’t expect that either.
“We do not know what’s on those cellphones and we will not know, if ever, until trial,” Jacobsen said, adding the court struck a “fair balance” between the fair-trial rights of the accused and rights of the public to understand the rationale for the police search.
“It doesn’t add any direct (clarity to the Ford questions), but as you know every piece of information is another building block to perhaps getting at the truth of what really happened,” Jacobsen said.
Smith was gunned down in March outside a Toronto nightclub. Police allege Nisar Hashimi fired the fatal bullet, while Mohamed, whose cellphone was determined to be in the location of the slaying, contacted Hashimi 23 times that night.
Mohamed’s lawyer, Fariborz Davoudi, opposed the application to unseal the search warrants, saying the information could “taint” potential witnesses and the jury pool. He was successful in convincing a Superior Court judge to redact certain narrow pieces of information from the documents.
The case against Hashimi ended with a surprise guilty plea to manslaughter last month; first-degree murder charges against Mohamed are expected to be downgraded when he appears in court next week.