Canadians arrest 17 in alleged terror plot

OTTAWA — Seventeen Canadian residents were arrested and charged with plotting to attack targets in southern Ontario with crude but powerful fertilizer bombs, the Canadian authorities said Saturday.

The arrests represented one of the largest counterterrorism sweeps in North America since the attacks of September 2001. American officials said the alleged plot did not involve any targets in the United States, but added that its full dimension was unknown.

At a news conference in Toronto, home to at least six suspects, police and intelligence officials said they had been monitoring the group for some time and moved in to make the arrests Friday after the group arranged to take delivery of three tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be made into an explosive when combined with fuel oil.

"It was their intent to use it for a terrorist attack," said Mike McDonell, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police assistant commissioner. He said that, by comparison, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people was carried out "with only one ton of ammonium nitrate."

The 17 men were mainly of South Asian descent and most were in their teens or early 20s. One was 30 years old and the oldest was 43, police officials said. None had any known affiliation with al-Qaida.

"They represent the broad strata of our society," McDonell said. "Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed."

On the list

Canadian police declined to identify specific targets, though they did dismiss reports that Toronto's subway system was on the list. The Toronto Star, citing an unidentified source, said the group had a list that included the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa as well as the Toronto branch office of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. At the news conference, officials emphasized that the targets were all in Canada.

The arrests reignited fears among U.S. counterterrorism officials about the porous northern border even as the Bush administration and lawmakers have focused attention in recent weeks on tightening the southern border in an effort to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants.

Since the arrest of Ahmed Ressam in December 1999 as he tried to smuggle explosive chemicals into Washington state in a plot to strike targets that included the Los Angeles international airport, authorities have expressed fears that extremists could use Canada as a platform to make attacks inside the United States.

The arrests came at the end of a week of furious debate over federal spending for homeland security, with officials in cities like New York and Washington bitterly criticizing Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, for not allocating more money to cities thought likely to remain high on the terrorist target list for al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

Beyond planning stage

Counterterrorism officials said interviews with suspects would provide greater clarity about the nature of the plot, but they said the men had taken a significant step, moving beyond the planning stage, toward acquiring a large quantity of potentially explosive fertilizer.

It was not clear whether the group ever had possession of the chemicals, or whether authorities may have had a role in arranging for the shipment or transporting the material. A police spokeswoman, Cpl. Michele Paradis, when asked whether the group had actually had the three tons of chemicals in possession, and if the police had "seized" it, replied: "That's difficult to answer. They made arrangements to have it delivered and they took delivery."

American officials said White House officials were briefed on the case in recent days and that counterterrorism agencies were in contact with Canadian authorities who warned them of the arrests.

U.S. concerns

One senior counterterrorism official said there had been extensive contact between American and Canadian authorities in the past several days. Though there appeared to have been no direct threat inside the United States, the proximity of the potential terrorists to the American border "really got everybody's attention," the official said.

U.S. officials were granted anonymity because they were speaking about a continuing investigation.

The FBI issued a statement Saturday saying there was a "preliminary indication" that some of the Canadian suspects might have had "limited contact" earlier this year with two people from Georgia who were recently arrested. Those two were Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, an American of Bangladeshi descent, and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a Pakistani-born American.

Law-enforcement officials said the two had made "casing" videos of various sites in Washington, D.C., and have said that their case was linked to the arrests of several men in Britain last fall, and that both were believed to have met with "like-minded Islamic extremists" in Canada in March 2005.

A counterterrorism official in the United States said there was no evidence the Georgia suspects were involved in the Canadian bombing plot.

The Canadian suspects were arrested in a series of raids that began late Friday night and continued early Saturday morning in Toronto, the Toronto suburb of Mississauga and in Kingston, a college town southwest of Ottawa.

All were taken to a heavily fortified police station in Pickering, Ontario, a city east of Toronto.

Five were under the age of 18 and not identified by the authorities.

The others were identified as Fahim Ahmad, 21; Zakaria Amara, 20; Asad Ansari, 21; Shareef Abdelhaleen, 30; Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43; Mohammed Dirie, 22; Yasim Abdi Mohamed, 24; Jahmaal James, 23; Amin Mohamed Durrani, 19; Steven Vikash Chand, alias Abdul Shakur, 25; Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, 21; and Saad Khalid, 19.