RCMP meeting 'threats': Counter-terrorism officers ask watchlist suspect for insight
The day after the deadly attack in Ottawa, two RCMP officers from the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team met with Muhammed Islam at a Toronto Tim Hortons to ask what he thought about what had happened.
A Muslim convert from what he called a “very violent” family background, Mr. Islam is one of the roughly 90 high-risk travellers whose passports have been seized to prevent them from leaving to take part in extremist violence in Syria and elsewhere.
“They called me up and sent an email,” the
32-year-old Toronto resident said of the counter-terrorism officers he met last week. He spoke to them willingly, he said. The constable he usually deals with showed up with his sergeant. “They had the big boss there.”
Such meetings are likely taking place across Canada as the RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and local police probe the attacks that killed two Canadian Forces members in Quebec and Ottawa — and try to prevent the next one.
Following Monday’s hit-and-run attack by Martin Couture-Rouleau, whom the RCMP had flagged as a security threat after he tried to leave for Syria in July, authorities are under pressure to ensure the others on their watch list don’t commit violence.
Both attacks followed a month of relentless online propaganda by the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham, which implored its followers to kill Canadians in retaliation for the government’s decision to join the international anti-ISIS military coalition.
Testifying before the Senate National Security and Defence committee Monday, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said police and intelligence agencies were reviewing their files on those considered high-risk to ensure “the evaluation of the threat on those people is articulated and is responded to in a way that gives us confidence.”
Mr. Islam insisted nobody should worry about him. “It’s amazing to me that I am actually viewed as a national security threat and possible terrorist, that I lost the passport and had an agent sent to try and set me up … that I am under constant surveillance, monitored all the time, or most of the time at least,” he said.
In an interview, emails and text messages, Mr. Islam explained how he ended up being designated a high-risk traveller — described by Comm. Paulson as those police have identified as radicalizing to violent extremism but whom they lack the evidence to charge.
Originally from Halifax, Mr. Islam said in a video about his conversion that he had a troubled childhood. “My family are criminals, you could say.” His father left home when Mr. Islam was two. He never finished school.
He began his criminal “career” at age 14. “I would rob, steal a lot of things and assault people,” he said in the video. He would steal cars just because he didn’t feel like walking. “I felt like there was a void, something missing.”
He converted at age 20. He said it calmed him. But in 2009, after moving to Toronto, he asked an acquaintance about buying AK-47s and hand grenades. When Muhammad Robert Heft, a Toronto Muslim leader, found out, he reported Mr. Islam to CSIS.
Mr. Islam admitted asking about buying military weapons but said he never intended to acquire them. He said he only asked about them to test whether the Toronto Islamic centre he was frequenting was under surveillance.
Then last year, he met two friends at Big Moe’s Burgers in Toronto. Mr. Islam said he was talking about “the war on terror and the problems going on in the Muslim world.” Before “really getting into our rants,” Mr. Islam insisted that all three of them put their cell phones away in the car. He said he feared the devices were bugged.
The conversation continued and Mr. Heft said he was later told that Mr. Islam intended to go to Syria. Mr. Islam denied that. He said one of the men simply grew suspicious. “Because I put the phones in the car that night, that made him believe I wanted to go to Syria,” he said.
Given the circumstances, Mr. Heft again called CSIS. “I called because I’m concerned,” Mr. Heft, head of the Muslim support group Paradise Forever and an outspoken critic of extremism, said in an interview Monday. “I’m concerned for his safety and the safety of others.”
The RCMP followed up with interviews and Mr. Islam’s passport was ultimately seized. “I understand what the RCMP did and only hope that there will be also a way for him to earn the honour of traveling on a Canadian passport again,” Mr. Heft said.
But Mr. Islam said he had no intention of going to Syria, although he had once hoped to visit Mauritania. “I was never saving money to go to Syria or Iraq. I had no plan to go there so these are all rumours,” he said. He believes he was targeted by police because of his religious and political views.
On the Internet, Mr. Islam has written that Hamas had “every right to fight the occupation,” called Israel a “terrorist state” and claimed a New World Order was being imposed. “Die,” he commented beneath a video showing a U.S. soldier getting hit by Taliban gunfire.
He called Prime Minister Stephen Harper “a piece of s— globalist puppet” and wrote disparagingly about U.S. President Barack Obama, Malala Yusufzai, and a Muslim serving in the U.S. Marines. “I wonder how the brother will explain invasions of Muslim lands by a non-Muslim military to steal the resources and murder people,” he wrote.
When Islamic law was imposed in a part of Yemen, he wrote, “May Allah then provide a means for Muslims living in non-Muslim lands to see the benefit taking shape and to relocate themselves back to where we belong.”
I do not support ISIS or Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or terrorist organizations around the world. I never said I was going to go to Syria or Iraq for jihad or any other war zone for that matter.
The RCMP declined to comment on Mr. Islam. According to Mr. Islam, the RCMP sent an undercover agent to collect evidence against him but the investigation produced nothing incriminating because he discovered at the outset that a man who took an interest in him “was an agent so I just let him do his thing for a year and I didn’t say anything.”
He said he lived a simple life. He has never left Canada and speaks to few people. “I do not support ISIS or Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or terrorist organizations around the world. I never said I was going to go to Syria or Iraq for jihad or any other war zone for that matter,” he said.
“I do not support terrorism at all, nor am I a jihadi. I am not radicalized and the rumours people spread about me are just rumours and nothing else,” he said. “The tragedies that took place in Ottawa and Quebec are against Islam and I do not support any of those actions.”
When the RCMP contacted him after last week’s attacks, he didn’t mind, he said. They met for two hours over coffee. He described it as a casual chat. “I’m not really bothered by it,” he said of being labeled a national security threat. “It’s been routine, actually. And whatever happens is destined to happen.”
http://nationalpost.com/news/canada...tack/wcm/12f0575d-b21f-4b63-8f22-1bd1acee545a
