Regina Leader-Post

No shortage of work for terror investigat­ors

- CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD

TORONTO — As the strange proceeding that was the Via train terrorism case was handed over to the jurors on Wednesday, Chiheb Esseghaier seized one of the last chances he may have to correct Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael Code.

Esseghaier was objecting to something the judge had told the jurors about him (the judge’s remarks were in fact deeply circumspec­t) before sending them out to deliberate.

The 31-year-old former PhD student is, as Code said, “a self-represente­d accused with a very, very firm view about how he wants to conduct his case,” and now he wanted to put his latest thoughts on the record.

As Esseghaier put it in trademark style: “That’s why, me, when there’s something wrong, give you sincere advice.”

The day before, again in the jury’s absence, he’d painted a picture of what he’d sincerely like Canada to look like — no alcohol, “no pig meat,” no music, no theatre, no churches, no synagogues and no “hypocritic­al” mosques, and, of course, women locked in their homes except for emergencie­s and if they go out on those rare occasions they must be fully covered.

It was, of course, precisely how Afghanista­n was — Esseghaier claimed to have met former mujahedeen while on two trips to Iran — while under Taliban rule.

At these latest homilies, in the adjacent booth of the prisoner’s box, Esseghaier’s co-accused, 37-year-old Raed Jaser, sat still and tightly wound as if to underline the chasm between them. If body language could be put into words, Jaser’s would have screamed: “I am not like him.”

But once, prosecutor­s Croft Michaelson, Sarah Shaikh and Marcy Henshall alleged, the two who appeared so different in court — Jaser always in shirt and tie and on hyper-alert, Esseghaier in casual garb, often plucking at his big beard or yawning, even dozing off — were of one mind.

They are charged with multiple terrorism offences in their alleged plot in 2012 to derail a New York-Toronto passenger train, either by drilling or blowing out a hole in a railway bridge.

Defence lawyers John Norris and Breese Davies, who represente­d Jaser, argued that the two were never agreed, either on the specific rail plot or on any general conspiracy to “murder persons unknown,” as the indictment reads. Rather, they say, Jaser was a small-time con artist who was playing along hoping to scam money first from Esseghaier and later, the undercover FBI agent who was posing as a wealthy American Muslim eager to support jihad.

(Jaser’s criminal record, which was never presented in court, with its five fraudrelat­ed conviction­s, might tend to back up Norris’s theory that if Esseghaier is and was sincere about jihad, Jaser was not. Had he not been deemed stateless — Jaser’s father, now a Canadian citizen, fled Palestine — he would have been deported because of his record. He never testified.)

The real name of that agent, who was sworn in and testified before the jurors as Tamer el-Noury, remains protected.

Code went to unusual lengths to guard his identity, even booting the press and public from the courtroom when the agent was on the witness stand, persuaded by the fact there’s only a small number of such officers “who are trained and are suitable” for these kinds of investigat­ions.

There appears no shortage of work for such men.

In the past six months alone in this country, two Canadian soldiers have been killed by lone-wolf terrorist attacks (Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, deliberate­ly struck by a car at a Quebec military base, and Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, shot in the back while on ceremonial guard duty at the National War Memorial in Ottawa) and two criminal trials of alleged foiled terrorists (the Via case in Toronto, and in Vancouver, the ongoing trial of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody) have started up.

As Esseghaier and Jaser are pleading not guilty, so are Nuttall and Korody for their alleged plan to plant pressure-cooker bombs at the 2013 Canada Day celebratio­ns on the lawns of the provincial Legislatur­e in Victoria.

And as the former’s fevered plots — in addition to the Via derailment, the two spoke of a sniper plot to pick off Jews and leaders, a poison plot at a Canadian Forces base, even a plot to explode a long-dormant volcano — seemed far-fetched, so were Nuttall’s and Korody’s.

Both were formerly homeless, with drug and alcohol problems, and seemed particular­ly hapless.

But if it’s tempting, as the panoply of terrorism and alleged terrorist plots plays out across this country — and abroad, with various young Canadians heading off to join Islamic State — to dismiss the homegrown jihadists or their imitators as clownish misfits, it’s instructiv­e to remember the terrorist “successes.”

Martin Couture-Rouleau, who struck and killed Vincent, was a 25-year-old failed entreprene­ur who self-radicalize­d on the web. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the 32-yearold who shot Cirillo, just 24, before storming Parliament Hill, had a history of drug abuse and mental illness, but was sober and perfectly lucid in the video he made shortly before he launched.

Had either of them bragged of their plans beforehand — to treat a car like a weapon and run it into a couple of random soldiers, to shoot a soldier and then attack Parliament — they would have sounded no less cartoonish than Nuttall’s notion of storming a nuclear submarine, or Esseghaier’s of blowing up the volcano at Yellowston­e National Park.

After all, as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, once wrote, “Where there is no imaginatio­n, there is no horror.”

 ?? ANDREW VAUGHAN/The Canadian Press files ?? A Toronto jury has spent just over a month hearing the case of Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier,
who are accused of plotting to derail a Via Rail passenger train between Canada and the U.S.
ANDREW VAUGHAN/The Canadian Press files A Toronto jury has spent just over a month hearing the case of Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier, who are accused of plotting to derail a Via Rail passenger train between Canada and the U.S.
 ?? TAMMY HOY, JOHN MANTHA/The Canadian Press files ?? The fate of the accused men now rests in the hands of a jury.
TAMMY HOY, JOHN MANTHA/The Canadian Press files The fate of the accused men now rests in the hands of a jury.
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