Mounties make terror arrests in Quebec

Ten suspected of planning to join foreign extremist groups

MONTREAL— The RCMP has conducted a series of preventative terror-related arrests in the Montreal area, picking up a number of young people allegedly intent on fleeing the country.

The Mounties said 10 suspects were arrested on the weekend at Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport in the preemptive police action. Investigators believe they were intent on travelling abroad to join the ranks of foreign terror groups. No charges have been laid.

The police were allegedly alerted to the plan by parents of the individuals, RadioCanada reported Tuesday. The Frenchlanguage broadcaster quoted a lawyer for one of the young people as saying that his client was a “victim” and that the individual had been recruited on the Internet with the promise of a “better life.”

The arrests come several weeks after El Mahdi Jamali and his girlfriend, Sabrine Djermane, both 18, were arrested and charged with trying to flee the country to join a terror group as well as possession of explosive substances.

Shortly before that, two other Montreal men in their 20s, Merouane Ghalmi and Daniel Minta Darko, were the subject of a peace bond that forces them to wear an electronic tracking device, stop communicating with individuals in Syria and other countries, and refrain from consulting terrorist material on the Internet.

Court documents said the police had reason to believe they planned to commit an undisclosed terrorist act.

Lyne Decarie, the federal prosecutor responsible for the various ongoing terrorism cases in the Montreal area, has warned in the past that other similar cases were likely to come to the public’s attention. “Everyone knows there are a number of investigations in progress,” she had recently told reporters.

Last Friday, a reporter for La Presse witnessed one of the arrests that occurred in Saint-Léonard, a borough in northeast Montreal.

An adolescent was seen being escorted out of a house and into an unmarked vehicle by several police officers.

The family refused to comment following the operation.

The boy’s father declined to comment on the arrest when he was contacted by the newspaper again on Tuesday.

Yet a source said that it’s not the first time police have been seen at the residence.

Érique Gasse, a spokesperson for the RCMP, contacted on Tuesday, refused to comment on the arrest, or to even acknowledge that it had occurred.