Captured voices call for Canada to ‘burn’
On a chilly September late evening, three men take a post-dinner stroll through a suburban neighbourhood.
One of them, with a long flowing beard and wearing a traditional Arabic robe, nudges his companions toward the centre of the road. When a man walking his dog appears, he moves them away to avoid crossing paths in the residential cul-de-sac. He is cautious about anyone overhearing even a snatch of their conversation, leery about potential surveillance.
“We’re being watched,” Raed Jaser allegedly warns the other men, and he doesn’t realize the half of it. “The government knows who we are and where we are at all times.”
He is in the company of Chiheb Esseghaier, his friend and accomplice in an alleged terror plot, and Tamer el-Noury, an individual he’d met for the first time earlier that night. The latter is an undercover FBI agent wearing a body pack that records their discussion.
In a Toronto courtroom Wednesday, el-Noury recounted their exchange before the audiotape is played for the jury.
Jaser and Esseghaier are on trial, charged with multiple terrorismrelated offences, accused of conspiring to derail a Via passenger train, tentatively planned for later that year, December of 2012. They were arrested by the RCMP in April 2013.
The agent, who spent nearly a year gaining their trust, is the star witness against them.
In the stand, el-Noury notes that Jaser doesn’t look much now like he did back then. In court, the defendant has a neatly trimmed beard, wears a jacket and tie. He has pleaded not guilty.
Esseghaier, with his wildly untamed mane, shaggy pointed beard, untucked shirt, is . . . asleep in the dock, head dropping onto his right shoulder. Justice Michael Code has entered a not guilty plea on Esseghaier’s behalf after he refused — during arraignment nearly two weeks ago, in front of the jury pool — to do so, one way or the other.
What were these three men discussing that September night?
In the chilling words of Jaser, as captured on the intercept: “We want this whole city, the whole country, to burn.”
That was the core message the purported would-be terrorists intended to deliver in a video that would be uploaded to the Internet after the Maple Leaf — which travels between Toronto and New York City — had hopefully jumped off the track they were scheming to disable, preferably while the train sped across an elevated bridge, causing it to hurtle to the ground (not water) below. In the best-case scenario, upwards of 50 or 60 passengers would be killed, fear and revulsion would seize the public, and both Washington and Ottawa would withdraw their troops from Muslim lands.
“We want to make sure that they understand that as long as they’re over there, their people will not be safe on this side,” said Jaser.
That was the central mission, the assault on a train. But they were pondering others, as divulged in hour after hour of secret recordings already played in court.
Codename “Fishing”: That was the train plot.
Codename “Hunting”: That was operation most eagerly envisioned by Jaser — sniper attacks targeting prominent Canadians, politicians and Jews, of course.
Of Operation Fishing, Jaser was untroubled by the thought of murdering innocent civilians, including women and children aboard the train.
“I could care less about who dies. Everyone is a target. They pay taxes ...”
Taxes which, he complained, were used to pay for armies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Operation Hunting could only unfold after, said Jaser, he secured a gun licence for himself. A permit to carry — rarely obtained in Canada — was what he really wanted.
It would be so easy, Jaser pointed out at one point, to shoot Canadian politicians dead, sniper-style, out in the open because, unlike their American counterparts, elected representatives here weren’t commonly surrounded by security details. “They do public speeches. They are very aggressive in Canada. The reason why is because they feel safe.”
He adds: “We have lots of MPs, MPPs . . . the mayor of Toronto.”
El-Noury, posing as a wealthy American real estate developer: “Wow.”
Jaser: “The mayor of Toronto is useless. He takes the subway in Toronto.”
Once or twice maybe, when thenmayor Rob Ford did photo-op appearances on the tube, but Jaser doesn’t tell el-Noury that part.
“In fact, he told me the Toronto mayor takes the subway,” el-Noury testified. “He said something about cutting the head off the snake and the body will be confused.”
In any event, subway-hunting, yeah, or, maybe the Gay Pride parade; lots of politicians (famously, not Rob Ford), turn out on that annual occasion.
“Bunch of faggots,” snorts Jaser. “That’s when we hit them.”
The jury has thus far heard very little about the background of the defendants or why Jaser apparently believed they had already come under watch of the security and intelligence community. To el-Noury, Jaser had said Muslims drew suspicion, but seemed not to make any distinction between radical Islam and mainstream Islam. “He said, Islam is not rational,” el-Noury told Crown attorney Sarah Shaikh. “He said that we were seen as too extremist, too radical and then he said, ‘The thing is, we are.’ ”
The train derailment plot called for three men — now that el-Noury had finagled his way into their confidence — to drill a hole in a railway bridge under cover of darkness, doing it quick, an hour or two before the train passed over a bridge. They’d already scouted several possible sites as strike targets, court has heard.
Procuring the equipment they’d need for the purpose, and renting an apartment to store the gear before the assault day, was to be el-Noury’s responsibility, through his (fictional) company. “We need someone to protect our back . . . this person who protects our back should be someone who has a very good position,” Esseghaier noted. “He has, you know, the ability to manage the situation by distance.”
El-Noury would upload the declaration video off a USB drive, from the U.S., using an untraceable IP address.
Both Jaser and Esseghaier were keenly preoccupied with this video, its purpose also to make clear that the train derailment had been no accident. They mused about where the video should be shot in advance; a location that would be clearly recognizable as Canadian, perhaps somewhere in the mountains out west. And maybe one of them could hold up a copy of that day’s newspaper. It sounded very much like something they’d seen in a movie.
At the end of that walk in September, the three men stood next to el-Noury’s car and prayed, the witness testified.
“It was an Islamic prayer because we were about to embark on this very special mission together.” Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.