THE TERROR RAIDS: The Pakistan Connection(Canada terrorist plot)

THE TERROR RAIDS: The Pakistan Connection

Man held in U.K. tied to cell here

TIMOTHY APPLEBY AND OMAR EL AKKAD AND HAMIDA GHAFOUR

TORONTO, LONDON -- Pakistani links to the alleged Canadian terror conspiracy have multiplied with the arrest of a 21-year-old man at Britain's Manchester Airport on Tuesday.

The man, who arrived on a flight from Pakistan, is reported to have lived at one time with some of the Toronto-area suspects.

The arrest is the third confirmed connection to Pakistan, a major base for Islamic radicals.

The unidentified man, whose hometown is Bradford in Yorkshire, was being interrogated under Britain's Terrorism Act about the alleged plot, which saw 17 suspects across the Greater Toronto Area scooped up Friday night and Saturday morning. Ottawa is expected to start extradition hearings.

Also detained at about the same time was a 16-year-old British youth from the nearby Yorkshire town of Dewsbury, arrested around the same time the flight landed.

Authorities would not comment on their role in the alleged Canadian plot, in which 12 adult males and five juveniles were arrested after the RCMP-controlled delivery of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to some of the suspects in Newmarket, north of Toronto.

Mixed with fuel oil, ammonium nitrate can be fashioned into crude but powerful bombs, and prosecutors have named a number of buildings in Toronto and Ottawa believed to have been on the suspects' hit list.

One of the 12 adults picked up Friday and Saturday had visited Pakistan in recent months. In a synopsis of the prosecution's case, seen by The Globe and Mail, 23-year-old Jahmaal James is said to be the only suspect to have visited that country during the two-year investigation.

In brief interviews, Mr. James's father and a man who attended the same Mississauga mosque as Mr. James said Mr. James went to Pakistan a few months ago to get married, returning to Canada without his new wife.

But the Crown's synopsis states that police have surveillance evidence showing that in conversations with fellow suspect Fahim Ahmad, 21, Mr. James was encouraged to visit a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.

Whether he did so was not stated.

References to the region also arise in website statements posted in 2003 by a third man arrested on the weekend, Zakaria Amara, 20.

While discussing the possibility of using a game of paintball as training for real combat, Mr. Amara wrote: "if ur intention is that of training, then go to peshawar or kashmir and train properly..."

Pakistan is one of only three countries to have recognized Afghanistan's repressive Taliban regime as a legitimate government, before the Taliban were toppled in late 2001, and it plays a central role in Islamic extremism. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the other two.

For years, Pakistan's madrasas -- madrasa is the Arabic word for school, but is most often used to describe Pakistan's hard-line Islamic education centres -- have been criticized for teaching a violent, deeply conservative interpretation of Islam that espouses holy war against a varied list of groups deemed infidels.

One of two U.S. men, who is under investigation by the FBI and who visited Canada in March of last year to meet three of the Canadian suspects, was born in Pakistan.

Syed Haris Ahmed immigrated to the United States from Pakistan in 1997 when he was 12. On March 23, a federal grand jury in Georgia indicted him for material support of terrorism.

The oldest of the Toronto-area suspects, 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal has perhaps the most direct blood ties to Pakistan among the Canadian accused. He was born in Karachi.

Ahmed Said Khadr, one of Canada's most notorious terrorism suspects, was killed by Pakistani authorities in 2003, and one of Mr. Khadr's four sons disappeared in Pakistan.

The BBC also cited a connection between the 21-year-old British man's detention and the mass arrests in the GTA, but a spokeswoman for West Yorkshire police would not confirm or deny it.

Nor would the RCMP, saying the matter was under investigation.

After the twin arrests in Britain, police were searching at least three homes located near a mosque in Bradford. Both Yorkshire towns have sizable Indo-Pakistani communities and Dewsbury was home to one of the July 7 suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London last summer.

In what may be a related development, meanwhile, newspapers reported yesterday that the allegedly foiled Canadian conspiracy may have been part of an elaborate international network linked to fugitive Iraqi terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Over the past nine months, police and intelligence agents in eight countries including Canada, the United States and Britain have worked through masses of emails and phone calls that have led to the arrests of about 30 suspects, The Times of London said.

Intelligence sources told the newspaper the network communicated through the Internet and began unravelling when police in Bosnia arrested an 18-year-old Muslim convert last October and seized his computer. Within hours there were raids in London.

The Canadian end of the network came to light when police arrested a man in London who allegedly ran al-Qaeda websites for Mr. Zarqawi, The Wall Street Journal said.

Younis Tsouli, who played a role in distributing images of hostages in Iraq being beheaded, was believed to have been in touch with the Toronto cell, the Journal reported.

Mr. Zarqawi, who has a $25-million (U.S.) bounty on his head, has urged young Muslims around the world to ignite religious wars in their home countries.

The Canadian suspects were drawn to his cause through the Internet and radical Islamist websites, the Journal said, quoting a U.S. federal official as saying the investigators wanted to snare as many suspects as possible.

"We let the operation run as long as we had to, to make sure we could identify as many would-be terrorist operators as we could and then to pick them off one, two, three and finally 17 at a time."