The Season of Their Discontent

"This is a very serious offence for which our client faces serious penal consequences. This is not your routine impaired driving charge."
"This is an application about trial fairness."
Giuseppe Cipriano, defence lawyer

(The peculiar reference to a 'routine impaired driving charge' echoes this same law firm defending a fatal drunk driving charge against a Pembroke dentist, Christie Natsis, which lead attorney Michael Edelson has manipulated toward dismissal despite validating evidence. In the Khurram Sher-terrorist case Mr. Edelson objected to the prosecution associating his client, Sher, with efforts to avoid surveillance.)

Mr. Cipriano's client, Khurram Syed Sher, 31, born in Montreal, and as a pathologist by profession, set to begin work at St.Thomas Elgin General Hospital near London, Ontario, opened the trial proceedings with a motion to the court asking for additional information from Crown prosecutors. He feels that in fairness to his client, his law team requires more specific information on the case they are defending.

Theirs is a rather challenging and surely unenviable position, defending a young man born and raised in Canada, who attended McGill University, and was immersed in Canadian society, who chose to differentiate himself from most other Canadian citizens by subscribing to the principles, values  and the religious authority of violent Islamist jihad.

The Crown's prosecution rests on 11,000 documents and 200,000 pages of evidence carefully documented through a lengthy investigation prior to the arrest of Khurram Sher and his two co-conspirators, to commit terrorist acts in Canada, targeting Canadians and Canadian institutions. On the second day of the trial of accused terrorism collaborator Khurram Syed Sher, part of the evidence against him and the two other accused was revealed.

It consisted largely in airing a covertly recorded conversation where Mr. Sher discussed bomb-making, and inferred that one of the group's attacks could conceivably take place at a repatriation ceremony at Canadian Forces Base Trenton. No doubt that choice made eminently good sense to the conspirators; attacking a solemn welcome-home ceremony of a Canadian soldier killed by a Taliban IED.

"We'll break their backs in their own country" one of Mr. Sher's buddies, a Canadian-born citizen said, when their conversation recorded by the RCMP in 2010 with the use of microphones secreted in the apartment where the three met, turned to the distinguishing facial hair they all wore. "I can just go to, like, a hardware store and buy a few things to build a bomb. I'm sure it's possible", ventured Mr. Sher, father of three young children.

To the charges levelled against him, Mr. Sher has pleaded not guilty.  In the recording played for the court, he mentioned his 2005 trip to Pakistan to aid victims of the earthquake. While there meeting a man he discussed "training" with. Another of his companions mentioned his thought of fighting with Chechen rebels in Russia. It was during this casual meeting, it appears, that they decided to formally become a working group.

The prosecution alleges the group that the three formed constituted a formal pro-jihad linkage called a Jamaa, and that Mr. Sher contributed money in support of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, groups closely associated with radical Islam, fighting NATO, and by extension, Canadian soldiers. The donation was meant to help fund weapons for Afghan Taliban.

The conspirators had taken precautions over possibly being detected by Canadian security agents. They used public telephones, used coded language on cellphones, and they used assumed names on an email address to communicate, accessed exclusively at the Ottawa Public Library. The prosecution case has in its possession 96 phone intercepts, 24 Internet intercepts and 33 emails germane to the case.

Police covertly exchanged 56 harmless replicas of circuit boards with those contained in the apartment of one of the co-conspirators. There was discovered to be other bomb paraphernalia there, along with an instruction booklet with a plan schematic for the manufacture of remote explosives.

The evidence is slowly, once again, revealing the presence within Canada of a (hopefully) small, but potentially lethal number of less-than-loyal Canadian citizens.