Lindhout suspect’s long route to court
Undercover cops pursued him for five years
An RCMP officer pretended to be a book agent during a five-year undercover operation aimed at luring to Canada a Somali man suspected in the kidnapping of journalist Amanda Lindhout.
Details of that operation were confirmed for the first time Tuesday in an Ottawa courtroom, as the same investigation came under blistering attack from a defence lawyer for Ali Omar Ader, who is accusing the national police force of “a pattern of negligence.”
The RCMP officer, who cannot be named under a court order, first made telephone contact with a man known as “Adam” in late June 2010, seven months after Lindhout and her travelling companion, Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, were released by their captors in Mogadishu.
The RCMP officer would spend years building a relationship with “Adam” during an extended series of telephone conversations in order to entice him to come to Canada as part of a book deal.
Ader, then 38, was arrested in an Ottawa hotel room in June 2015 and charged with kidnapping under the extraterritorial provisions of the Criminal Code.
He is to go on trial before a judge at the Ottawa Courthouse in October.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Smith is now hearing a series of pre-trial motions in the case, the first of its kind in Canada.
Defence lawyer Trevor Brown on Tuesday asked the judge to throw out a significant portion of the government’s wiretap evidence.
During its eight-year pursuit of the kidnappers, the RCMP sought and received 17 different court authorizations to intercept and record telephone calls between the group’s ransom negotiator and Lindhout’s parents, and later, the undercover officer. The first eight authorizations all took place while Lindhout was still a hostage.
But Brown argued — based on RCMP testimony heard earlier this week — that the evidence collected from those wiretaps should be thrown out because of a raft of mistakes. In applying for the first wiretap, for instance, an RCMP officer failed to inform the judge that the police had already recorded three conversations between the kidnapper and Lindhout’s father. The police had recorded those calls under rarely-used emergency provisions of the Criminal Code.
The law requires police officers to provide “full, frank and fair disclosure” to a judge when they request a wiretap, and Brown said they fell short of that mark.
Other wiretap authorizations, Brown said, included significant errors such as an erroneous date and an unsigned affidavit; another was wrongly issued for 60 days instead of two days, and still another failed to provide any grounds for intercepting communications.
Taken together, he said, “It’s negligence that gets closer and closer to gross negligence as things proceed.”
Federal prosecutor Croft Michaelson is expected to argue that the mistakes largely amount to “technical errors.”
Michaelson, however, has already conceded that the government cannot introduce evidence from a series of unauthorized wiretaps that the RCMP conducted at the outset of its operation to lure Ader to Canada.
For reasons that remain unclear, the undercover RCMP team decided to contact Ader before it had a court order in place to intercept and record the phone conversations, even though it knew such an order was required. The RCMP recorded calls between June 24 and July 9, 2010, without the court order in place. None of those recordings will be allowed into evidence.
Trevor Brown argued that the RCMP’s conduct — and its failure to disclose the unauthorized wiretaps to subsequent judges — has “a cascading effect” and pollutes evidence collected under the authority of later court orders.
The motion will continue to be argued in court Wednesday.
A freelance journalist, Lindhout was abducted with Brennan in August 2008 while on a two-week research trip to Somalia. She was beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted during 15 months of captivity, which she detailed in her bestselling memoir, A House in the Sky. The two families eventually paid $600,000 in ransom to secure the pair’s release, which was managed by a private security company, AKE, based in London.
The kidnappers had originally demanded $1.5 million for Lindhout, and before she was released, she was forced to sign a contract pledging to send more money after she returned home.
Court heard this week that “Adam” contacted Lindhout’s mother in January 2010 in an effort to speak to Lindhout. That phone call initiated the RCMP undercover operation that would lead to Ader’s arrest.
The RCMP has characterized Ader as “one of the main negotiators” for the extremist group that held Lindhout.