Couple lived on methadone and pills
Court: After two and a half months, Mountie’s time on the stand comes to a close
What is wrong with the picture of accused terrorist John Nuttall riding around with an undercover police officer while swigging methadone as if it were Red Bull?
Forget about measured doses — the supposed brains behind the plot to detonate pressurecooker explosive devices at the legislature in 2013 didn’t even have a prescription.
For the second time in front of the Mountie playing an Arab extremist, he was sucking back his wife’s medication from a brown vial — he had been kicked off the provincial program for heroin addicts and she was receiving more than she needed.
Amanda Korody had her own cocktail, they explained to the officer — she mixed the bitter orange methadone half-and-half with crushed-up Gravol tablets and Tang.
Although police arranged for a Delta hotel room so the Surrey couple had a quiet place to assemble detonators, the key actor in the sophisticated trap was driving them back and forth to their basement suite for a daily drug delivery.
The RCMP corporal, who cannot be identified or described by court order, said he wasn’t concerned about his target’s cavalier consumption: “He had done it so long I presumed Mr. Nuttall knew what he was doing.”
Are these the kinds of police tactics that must be condoned to pursue alleged terrorists?
Throughout the lengthy sting that nabbed this pair, Korody was vomiting constantly, swallowing Gravol like candy.
She told the officer who she called “Uncle Abe” that she ate so many pills once she awoke in the middle of the night hallucinating that a skinhead was staring in a window intent on killing them.
“He isn’t,” Nuttall assured her. “We’re on the fourth floor.”
The officer said he didn’t bother to investigate why Korody was also taking clonazepam, nor was he familiar with the drug — it is a benzodiazepine-type sedative used for treating panic attacks, social phobia, mania and posttraumatic stress.
Both Nuttall, 40, and Korody, 31, have pleaded not guilty to four terrorism charges related to the planting of inert bombs in Victoria on Canada Day.
Eking out a living on welfare in Metro Vancouver, the duo was befriended by the undercover operative who began targeting Nuttall in February 2013.
Over the following months, the Mountie paid Nuttall for doing odd jobs, bought him a suit, provided cigarettes and groceries, took the pair on trips to Victoria, Whistler and Kelowna, supplied them with hotel rooms and transportation. They looked up to him, admired him, referred to him as “the master” and hoped to join the gang of mujahedeen to which he supposedly belonged.
That was understandable — they didn’t have bus fare between them and were going hungry without the food he provided.
Roughly 90 hours of surveillance recordings played so far in B.C. Supreme Court revealed Nuttall to be self-aggrandizing, forgetful, scatterbrained — someone with the attention span of a goldfish who worried about being condemned to hellfire on the word of a cat.
He talked incessantly and couldn’t help drawing attention to himself — playing Arabic music so loud it could be heard echoing outside hotel rooms, yelling in parking lots at Canadian fighter jets passing overhead, being filmed by media at the legislature on his reconnaissance mission.
As a disguise, the six-foot-five Nuttall bought a large, broadbrimmed straw-like hat decorated with a flower.
The RCMP officer thought he looked “funny,” especially since he wouldn’t detach the flower for fear of leaving a hole — still, the Mountie maintained with a straight face that he didn’t think the hat made Nuttall stand out like a sore thumb.
Nuttall, who also liked to smoke pot, had a muddled sense of Islam, wasn’t sure when Canada Day was, and only agreed to a pressure-cooker bomb plot after the Mounties playing jihadists heartily assured him it was the most feasible option.
Korody seems to have gone along with being a martyr in the hope of being teleported to paradise and relieved of a tormented life of non-stop vomiting.
Everything was orchestrated and controlled by the RCMP and local agencies, who even staged a phoney meth-lab incident in the couple’s neighbourhood complete with haz-mat response teams.
The gruelling cross-examination of the officer, who has spent two and a half months on the stand, ended Tuesday, leaving the Crown’s case, after only a single witness, tarnished.
The magnitude and duration of the 240-officer police operation, the financial and emotional inducements, the mental, social and economic disadvantages of the suspects — all cast a pall on the prosecution.
The trial continues.