Is B.C. legislature bombing case unravelling after guilty verdicts?

• “The first thing I did is, when I converted,” accused terrorist John Nuttall told an undercover RCMP officer, “my first question was, OK, how do I do the five prayers, how do I worship Allah?”

The c onversation, in early June 2013, was being secretly recorded. Nuttall didn’t know he and his wife, Amanda Korody, were targets of an elaborate — possibly illegal — sting operation conducted by police, with help from Crown prosecutors.

A pair of basement-dwelling, recovering drug addicts with few resources, Nuttall and Korody were found guilty of terrorism- related crimes by a B. C. Supreme Court jury last year. No convictions have been entered, because their defence lawyers claim the pair was entrapped, that authorities seized on the couple unfairly, pulling them into a police-contrived plot to detonate three homemade pressure cooker bombs at the B. C. legislature on Canada Day, 2013.

A post- verdict entrapment hearing is now playing out in a Vancouver courthouse. Should the defence arguments prevail in this phase of the trial, Madam Justice Catherine Bruce may enter a stay of proceedings and Nuttall and Korody could be set free.

Certain aspects of the RCMP’s sting operation — dubbed Project Souvenir — were not shared with the j ury that found the pair guilty on two counts each last summer. Information is coming to light now, at the entrapment hearing. It isn’t helpful to police, or the Crown.

“My s econd question was, where is my gun, let’s go jihad,” Nuttall told the undercover Mountie, posing as a wealthy Islamist, in their June 6, 2013, conversation. “And I went to every mosque and they all shunned me, you know. They shunned me, they shunned me and they, some of them even called the police on me.”

Four days after that conversation, and just three weeks before arrests were made, a Crown prosecutor giving legal advice to RCMP operatives wrote to one of Project Souvenir’s senior officers. Martha Devlin revealed strong doubts about Nuttall and his capacity for committing terrorist acts.

“This guy really is a nut. Not sure there’s anything here,” Devlin told the Mountie, in an email exchange described in court this week. “My impression is, he has no plan and just sort of makes stuff up.”

Why would the advising prosecutor say that? Because, as the court has heard many times, Nuttall was prone to making ludicrous claims to undercover operators. At one point he said he’d witnessed unmarked white airplanes flying over his Surrey, B.C., home, making “chemtrails” to control population growth. “The next day I blow my nose (and) this yellow dust comes out of my nostrils,” he told one undercover Mountie.

Nuttall also bragged of having access to secret military information. The U. S. military had installed intercontinental ballistic missiles at a tiny Canadian Navy facility on Vancouver Is- land, he told an undercover Mountie. And “256 Canadian soldiers just returned from Afghanistan in Esquimalt ( near Victoria). They came off submarines that came in here ... and ( on) a freighter and a battleship.”

Nut, indeed. But the sting operation continued.

Devlin occasionally intervened, court has heard. It was disclosed that at one point, she “advised the RCMP” to stop making “payments of money” to Nuttall and Korody, apparently out of concern the payments would compromise the operation’s integrity.

Devlin also advised the RCMP operatives could “drive the accused to shop for the (bomb) parts but not OK to shop for them,” according to RCMP briefing notes recently disclosed at the entrapment hearing.

On July 1, 2013, Nuttall and Korody planted what they thought were three deadly bombs at the B. C. legislature grounds. While RCMP operatives had provided the pair with small amounts of explosive material, police made sure the devices were harmless. Nuttall and Korody were arrested and charged, and eventually they were found guilty.

A jury was convinced that Nuttall and Korody had conspired to commit murder and had made or possessed explosive devices with a terrorist purpose. The evidence was clear.

But, did the RCMP ruse go too far? Did an abuse of process occur, as the defence lawyers claim?

Madam Justice Bruce has already determined that, “in this case, there is evidence that the RCMP’s actions during Project Souvenir constituted the offence of facilita- tion of a terrorist activity ... In my view, the defence have raised at least a prima facie case that the RCMP officers involved in Project Souvenir were engaged in an unlawful activity.”

On the other hand, she noted, Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled that “police are entitled to provide opportunities for the commission of offences where they have reasonable suspicion to believe that the individuals in question are already engaged in criminal conduct.”

The entrapment hearing is expected to continue into February.

THIS GUY REALLY IS A NUT. NOT SURE THERE’S ANYTHING HERE.