Evidence-Gathering's Painstaking Pace

Surely the public, even with its notorious penchant for short-attention spans and forgetfulness must have given a stray thought or two on occasion to what had happened to the three men on Canadian soil implicated in terrorist activities. Men whose photographs, backgrounds and tender personal details splashed on the headlines of every newspaper in the country. An intense focus on three men of a decidedly radical Muslim persuasion, and then ... it all fizzled out.

Now we know it hadn't fizzled at all. It was still there, central to the investigative activities of the RCMP and CSIS, conferring with their international peers in intelligence gathering and steadily through that process collecting evidence to hammer the nails of !gotcha! into the coffins of these particular jihadists, Misbahuddin Ahmed, Hiva Mohammad Alizedeh and Khurram Syed Sher, outed in 2010.

The arrests of those three amid charges of terrorism led to the public attention focused on the painful reality of religion-inspired psychopaths seemingly living normal lives but planning to destroy the lives of others, living among us. And we, oblivious to their presence. Yet how could it be otherwise? To suspect people from ethnic and cultural backgrounds and 'other' religious faith of conspiring to bring tragedy upon the unsuspecting is to indulge in profiling and inclusion of innocents in suspicion.

Think about it; Misbahuddin Ahmed worked as an X-ray technician at the Civic campus of the Ottawa Hospital. Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh also of Ottawa, had studied electrical engineering technology in Winnipeg at Red River College. While Khurram Syed Sher was a doctor of pathology in London, Ontario. Yet these highly educated, skilled individuals chose a personal path to jihad; seeking to avenge themselves on those who spurned Islam.

Police claimed to have seized terrorist literature, videos and manuals, and dozens of electronic circuit boards designed to remotely detonate homemade bombs. They are all charged with Anti-Terrorism Act offences. The cloak of secrecy that was spread over the thousands of documents in this criminal case was applied by the federal government under the Canada Evidence Act in the argument that disclosure would be "injurious to national security, international relations or national defence."

And to protect an unnamed undercover source working for CSIS. Along with intelligence of a rather sensitive nature obtained from colleagues in the United States and Britain, all of which aided in building the terrorism case against the three suspects. Additional useful material was gained through an eavesdropping network that includes Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand":
the "Five Eyes" network.

The terrorism investigation relied heavily on the work carried out on behalf of CSIS by an undercover source whose identity the agency is committed to protecting. "In fact, in this particular case, the information about the CSIS human source is contained in a number of affidavits for search warrants and wiretaps and so on", explained a lawyer with the Justice Department's national security group.

A senior intelligence official with the Canadian Forces stressed the importance of safeguarding information provided by allies in the intelligence community, since that international-agencies-supplied evidence is also protected from scrutiny so that investigative techniques, identities and relationships with other security agencies and CSIS employees' names are all protected from identification.

Justice works its slow and methodical way to an eventual conclusion.

Three years after the three men were arrested and charged, their trials are slated for a year hence, yet. So those interested in the details and the outcome, will continue to remain on tenterhooks of curiosity, having to content ourselves with the understanding that our security agencies know what they're doing and plan on assembling iron-tight evidence fully implicating of these Canadian jihadists.