Canada Arrests 17 in Alleged Terror Plot

Authorities arrested 17 people and seized a large amount of potentially explosive material intended for terrorist attacks against targets in southern Ontario, Canadian officials said Saturday.

Officials said they recovered 3 tons of ammonium nitrate, a commonly used fertilizer, 1 1/2 times the amount used in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

Police are treating the case as a “homegrown plot by homegrown terrorists,” said Michele Paradis, a spokeswoman with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Most of the suspects are Canadian citizens and all are residents.

The police did not name any target, but RCMP Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonnell said: “This group posed a real and serious threat. It was their intent to use [the explosives material] for a terrorist attack.”

The FBI said some of the suspects arrested in Canada had contact with two Georgia men detained on terrorism-related charges in the U.S.

The Ontario suspects were “adherents of a violent ideology inspired by Al Qaeda,” said Luc Portelance, assistant director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He gave no details.

Authorities refused to give many specifics, but the Toronto Star newspaper reported that some members of the group allegedly attended a training camp north of the city where they made a video simulating warfare.

The investigation began with intelligence officials monitoring Internet chat sites. Officials said they worked for months on the case before taking action Friday night.

More than 400 officials raided sites across the province, arresting 12 men and five youths, all reportedly Muslim, on terrorism-related charges, police said. Those arrested included a 21-year-old health sciences student and a 30-year-old computer programmer.

The suspects appeared Saturday afternoon in a heavily guarded suburban courthouse. Bomb-sniffing dogs had inspected the building in the early morning and snipers in camouflage were visible on nearby rooftops.

The suspects were charged under terrorism laws passed by the Canadian Parliament in December 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. The Friday arrests were only the second time the laws had been applied.

In the first instance, Mohammed Momin Khawaja, a software operator from the Ottawa region, is scheduled to be tried in January for alleged ties to a British terrorist cell.

The Canadian cases, as well as that of the two U.S. defendants, are an example of how recent terrorism investigations have turned up homegrown suspects, unlike the Sept. 11 attacks, in which the bombers were new arrivals to the U.S. The London transit attacks last summer were carried out by young men who were raised in Britain and embraced radical Islam.

“We are seeing phenomena in Canada such as the emergence of homegrown ... terrorists,” Jack Hooper, deputy director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, recently told a Canadian Senate committee.

“These are people who may have immigrated to Canada at an early age who become radicalized while in Canada,” he said. “They are virtually indistinguishable from other youth. They blend into our society very well, they speak our language and they appear to be, for all intents and purposes, well assimilated.”

Several U.S. counter-terrorism officials say they have been cooperating closely on several investigations with counterparts in Canada, Britain and other countries since September.

“The FBI has worked closely with the Canadian authorities on this case,” agency spokesman Richard Kolko said Saturday, referring to the arrests in Ontario. “There is preliminary indication that some of the Canadian subjects may have had limited contact with the two people recently arrested from Georgia.”

Kolko said there was no threat to the United States arising from the alleged plot in Canada, and Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said there were no plans to increase security on the border.

One senior U.S. law enforcement official said that the two Georgia suspects, Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, had been communicating via e-mail with two of the men arrested in Canada.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are ongoing.

The suspects also traveled to Toronto from Atlanta by Greyhound bus to meet with “like-minded Islamic extremists” in early March, according to U.S. court documents.

Authorities also have discovered communications between the men in Canada and Atlanta and other suspected terrorists abroad, including a group arrested in London last fall. The London detainees include a computer specialist known as Irhabi007, the law enforcement official said. “Irhabi” means terrorist in Arabic.

The suspects’ “discussions were wide ranging, about a whole range of targets,” the official said, though some focused on Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

None of the plots were imminent, authorities said. But the alleged targets included Canadian government buildings, oil refineries in the Unites States and a U.S. tower that they believed controlled aviation GPS systems, according to the official and court documents filed in the case.

Sadequee and Ahmed had visited Washington and videotaped the U.S. Capitol, the World Bank headquarters and some fuel storage facilities, federal prosecutors in New York said at a recent hearing.

Terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann, who runs the website www.globalterroralert.com, said local groups were loosely affiliated with similar cells around the world and communicated through the Internet. “There are small groups of people like that here” in the U.S., he said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other cells like this,” said Kohlmann, who is based in Washington. “Unfortunately, that is the conclusion that has to be drawn from something like this.

“There is like a DNA-chain of operatives, and the thing that seems to connect them is computers, the Internet,” he said. “They are organizing on their own, without the help of any senior operatives.

“These guys are self-motivated, and that’s not encouraging when you are fighting a global war on terrorism, to see self-motivated terrorist cells popping up in Western countries like Canada.”

The two U.S. suspects were charged in late April.

Ahmed, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of providing material support for terrorism, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. He was indicted in Atlanta. The Pakistani native moved to the U.S. with his family when he was about 12 and became a citizen, according to an FBI affidavit filed in Sadequee’s case.

Sadequee, 19, has been charged with lying to FBI agents about his trip to Canada with Ahmed. He was indicted in New York and, if convicted, faces a maximum sentence of eight years. Sadequee was born in Fairfax, Va., the affidavit says. His family came from Bangladesh, and he had traveled to that country in August to get married. Bangladeshi authorities arrested him in April and turned him over to the FBI.

Ahmed told the FBI that the two met at an Atlanta-area mosque. In March 2005, they took a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Toronto, paying $280 for two round-trip tickets. It was there that they allegedly met with Islamic radicals and discussed possible attacks in the United States.

Ahmed “acknowledged that the purpose of the trip was for [them] to meet with like-minded Islamic extremists,” the affidavit says. “According to Ahmed ... they met regularly with at least three subjects of an FBI international terrorism investigation.”

They “discussed strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike, to include oil refineries and military bases,” the affidavit continues. “They also plotted how to disable the Global Positioning System [satellite network] to disrupt military and commercial communications and traffic. Finally, the assembled group developed a plan for traveling to Pakistan, where they would attempt to receive military training at one of several terrorist-sponsored camps.”

Ahmed later went to Pakistan to try to get training, the document states.

Sadequee was questioned by FBI agents at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport in August, as he was leaving for Bangladesh. When they asked about his travel to Canada, he allegedly told them he had traveled alone and had gone to visit an aunt. He left without incident.

The day after Sadequee’s departure, Ahmed returned to Atlanta after a month’s visit to Pakistan. When asked about other trips abroad, he mentioned his travel to Toronto with a friend named Sadequee.

Ahmed was questioned more closely in March of this year, the affidavit says, and he acknowledged the two had traveled to Canada to meet with other would-be “holy warriors.”

Times special correspondent Chow reported from Toronto and staff writer Alonso-Zaldivar from Washington. Staff writer Josh Meyer and researcher Vicki Gallay contributed to this report.