The case against Canada's plotters

The case against Zakaria Amara turned out to be a slam dunk.

After more than three years in pre-trial custody, he admitted he wasn't just the video-gaming 20-year-old his supporters claimed he was at the time of his arrest in 2006.

He was, he confessed, the mastermind of a bomb plot that could have killed scores of his fellow Canadians.

The mountain of evidence compiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP against Amara, a gas station attendant, was so high, he pleaded guilty in the hopes of getting a reduced sentence.

As reported by the CBC shortly after the arrests, Amara and the other alleged leader of the so-called Toronto 18 — his high school friend Fahim Ahmed — were the focal point of a police surveillance operation that began in November 2005.

That was seven months before the group was busted on June 2, 2006.

Ahmed had caught the attention of CSIS in 2002, when intelligence agents monitoring extremist chat rooms on the internet spotted him talking up jihad with someone in Calgary.

Amara didn't appear on CSIS radar screens until somewhat later.

But by the fall of 2005, intelligence officials had become increasingly concerned that both Amara's and Ahmed's angry talk was about to morph into violent action.

Under surveillance

In a joint operation between CSIS, the RCMP and local Toronto-area police, intelligence agents inserted two police moles into the Toronto 18 group, put Amara under 24-hour visual surveillance and wiretapped the phones of several other group members, while bugging their workplaces and cars and hacking into their internet accounts.

The blanket surveillance was so comprehensive that sometimes it seemed the police were spending more time in Amara's apartment than he was.

For example, in April 2006, police agents surreptitiously entered his apartment and made a copy of his computer hard drive. 

When the agents later opened it up, they found pictures of bomb-making chemical containers, an Arabic-language video explaining how to use the explosive RDX and instructions on mixing chemicals.

Two weeks later, on May 3, 2006, they entered the apartment again and found a black binder with the hand-written title "Bomb Making Manual," two green electronic circuit boards and ammunition for a 9-mm pistol.

The next day, Amara took his young wife, Nada, and their baby on an overnight excursion to Niagara Falls.

While the family was sightseeing, police intelligence agents searched their hotel room, where they found videotapes of explosions.

In an agreed statement of facts, Amara admitted to the court that he was guilty of helping form a terrorist group, recruiting members and plotting to kill scores of innocent people by detonating huge fertilizer bombs in front of the CSIS office in downtown Toronto, at the Toronto Stock Exchange and at an unnamed military base somewhere in Ontario.

In a conversation with one of his co-conspirators, Amara dubbed his plot "The Battle of Toronto" and bragged it would make the London subway bombings that killed 57 people and injured 700 look small by comparison.

What is also clear from his admissions in court is that, if not for the intervention of CSIS and the RCMP, it almost certainly would have happened.

Determined and intelligent

The evidence revealed Amara, the fourth member of the Toronto 18 to plead guilty in the past five months, was determined, intelligent and an exceptional organizer.

He learned how to build fertilizer bombs on the internet, built sophisticated cell phone-activated detonators and recruited co-conspirators he could rely on.

Most important, he somehow managed to gets his hands on about $30,000 in cash. That gave him the means to do what most other jihadi wannabes never end up doing — finance a terrorist attack.

But authorities thwarted the scheme, and scored their first court victory when a peripheral member of the group, Nishanthan Yogakrishnan, who was unaware of the bomb plot, was sentenced to two years in jail in September 2008.

He was released the following May, having received credit for time served in pretrial custody.

Amara is facing a possible life sentence, but if his lawyers have struck a deal with Crown prosecutors he could get far less.

The story continues

But the Toronto 18 story isn't over. Five have now pleaded guilty or been convicted and seven have had the charges against them dropped or stayed. But six accused still await trial, including Ahmed and Jamal James.

Court documents obtained by the CBC from the trials of two convicted American associates of the Toronto 18 suggest that Ahmed and James were involved in a terrorist plot that went far beyond Toronto.

Evidence entered at the trials earlier this year in Atlanta of Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Sadequee, reveal that in March 2005 the pair took a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Toronto to meet with Ahmed, James and several other young Toronto Muslim men.

The U.S. indictments also show that another man — 20-year-old British extremist Aabid Khan — flew in from London.

The group first met in a password-protected chat room called Clearguidance. Transcripts of their internet chats entered as evidence at Sadequee's trial reveal how they stoked each other's outrage at the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

At a Toronto mosque, they discussed attacking an unnamed oil refinery and the U.S. Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta.

But none of them had military training, so they agreed their first step would be to go to Pakistan and spend three months in a training camp run by the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

They decided to rent two basement apartments in Toronto as a base where they and five to seven other recruits, who were also part of their internet chat group, would join them before travelling to Pakistan.

After they learned how to handle weapons and make bombs, they planned to return to Toronto and choose targets in Canada, the U.S., Britain and continental Europe to attack in what they anticipated would be a spectacular and perhaps coordinated terrorist assault.

The plot eventually fizzled out, but one of the charges against James is that he eventually did go to Pakistan to get military training from a terrorist organization.

Waiting for the conclusion

Four days after the Toronto 18 were busted, Aabid Khan was arrested at Heathrow Airport as he disembarked from a flight from Islamabad.

In August 2008, in London, he was sentenced to 12 years for attempting to incite an act of terrorism. Syed Haris Ahmed and Sadequee were convicted in Atlanta and are facing a maximum 15-year sentence on terrorism conspiracy charges.

It's unclear how much Fahim Ahmed's and Jamal James's connections to convicted terrorists in other countries will factor into their own trials, if at all.

But even after Amara's surprise guilty plea this week, we are still waiting to hear the full story of the Toronto 18.