Family defends man behind Via Rail plot
Raed Jaser is a fraud artist, not a violent jihadist, brother and father insist
Every day of Raed Jaser’s trial for plotting violent acts of terror, a diminutive man with twinkling eyes and a ready smile sat in the first row of the courtroom’s public gallery. He is Jaser’s father, Mohammed. Sometimes joined by his wife and other sons, he listened quietly to the many hours of wiretaps from September 2012, where Jaser talks about his idea for murdering high-profile Canadians and members of the Jewish community with a sniper rifle, about how the problem with derailing a Via Rail passenger train was that too few people would die.
“We want this whole city, this whole country to burn,” Jaser, 38, said at one point, before he abandoned the train plot on Sept. 24, 2012, after an encounter with the police. “I could care less who dies. Everyone is a target. They pay taxes, they vote. They’re enemies.”
Earlier this year, Jaser was convicted of conspiring to commit murder in support of terrorism along with his co-accused, Chiheb Esseghaier, who was also found guilty of plotting to derail a train. On Wednesday, both men were sentenced to life in prison with concurrent sentences of 13 years and 18 years respectively for counts of participating in a terrorist group.
When Jaser was charged on April 22, 2013, it took his family completely by surprise. Ever since, however, Mohammed and his family say they have continued to stand by the oldest son, the black sheep of the family from a young age.
The strong support of the Jaser family was the sole mitigating factor in Jaser’s case for Superior Court Justice Michael Code, who described them as “responsible and pro-social individuals” in his lengthy sentencing decision.
“If I only knew Ray for those three weeks (captured in the wiretaps) I’d say he’s probably a terrorist or has those extremist views,” said Jaser’s younger brother Nabil, 34, in an interview, referring to Jaser by the nickname “Ray the Phaser” because he’s always going from one phase to the next. “But that’s just three weeks. What happened in the 30 years before that and after that? Look at the bigger picture.”
That picture, they firmly believe despite the chilling wiretaps, is one of a man who has spent his whole life manipulating and committing petty frauds for money and thrills — but not one of a violent jihadist.
“He is really good at hiding his true intentions. His mouth has gotten him into a lot of trouble,” Nabil said. “This is the most extreme case of him getting in s--- that he’s ever gotten in.”
“Since he was a teenager he wanted to get rich fast,” said Mohammed, describing how, after the Palestinian family left the United Arab Emirates where Jaser was born and eventually became refugees living in Germany, Jaser began to shoplift and rebel. “But he never, never, never (talked) about harming people.”
Their view of Jaser was rejected by the jury at trial, where Jaser did not testify but his lawyers argued that he was nothing more than a scam artist with a history of frauds and get-richquick schemes, lying about supporting jihad to get money out of the undercover FBI agent who was of- fering to help finance the terror plots.
At sentencing, Jaser told a psychologist during an assessment that he was a lifelong drug addict with serious addiction issues and claimed to be high during interactions with the undercover agent.
In his sentencing decision, Code found from the wiretaps there is no indication Jaser was impaired. (The undercover agent, who went by the alias Tamer el-Noury, also filed an affidavit saying he did not observe any sign of Jaser being high.) Code also said that Jaser’s “persistence in telling a false, exculpatory, minimizing story to (the psychologist) . . . indicates that he has not yet accepted responsibility for the offences.”
“For him to tell Justice Code ‘I’m sorry, I’m no longer a jihadist’ means that he is admitting he was a jihadist at one point, which he wasn’t,” said Nabil after the decision. Speaking to Jaser in jail, “he was always so pissed off it came to this point. To him it was just nothing but words and he was shocked it came to the point where it came to.”
“You want to tell me that a person can go from being totally sane and normal . . . to all of a sudden wanting to kill people.” NABIL JASER RAED JASER’S YOUNGER BROTHER
Both Mohammed and Nabil maintain they were never concerned about Jaser becoming a violent extremist, though he did go through a period in 2009 or 2010 where he became a much stricter — and in Nabil’s words, “annoying” — Muslim for a time, objecting to card games and giving their mother a hard time about not wearing a veil. They say he was always — like them — firmly opposed to religious violence.
“You want to tell me that a person can go from being totally sane and normal . . . to all of a sudden wanting to kill people. Like kill people,” said Nabil. “And right after that, all of a sudden he’s back to normal. There is no logic to saying someone is a parttime terrorist.”
The years since Jaser was charged and their lives turned upside down have of course been difficult, said Mohammed, who visits his son in jail weekly. In addition to Nabil, Jaser has two more younger brothers, both of whom have disabilities; of the family, only Jaser never became a Canadian citizen.
“We are the family of a convicted terrorist,” Nabil said simply, though he adds he has been lucky that his employer, a security company, has been supportive. They are still waiting for the sentencing decision to sink in, he said Wednesday.
His father left the courtroom with tears in his eyes after watching Jaser mouth a farewell before being escorted back to the cells. “We didn’t expect a life sentence . . . We knew once the jury came back with guilty verdict he was going to be going to the penitentiary, it was just matter of when and how long. (Now) we have to accept that there is a possibility of him being there the full 25 years.”
Jaser’s lawyers John Norris and Breese Davies have said they are planning to appeal both the convictions and the sentence. One of the arguments they expect to raise is the rejection of their request to have Jaser tried separately from Esseghaier, a man described by Norris on Wednesday as “profoundly mentally ill.”