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They are among the most unusual of couples. Joshua Boyle, 25, is the son of a tax judge whose empty home was shot up. Zaynab Khadr, 29, is the sister of Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr -- and Osama bin Laden attended her wedding in Afghanistan a decade ago.

The divorced, single mom and the research fanatic met over the Internet – their mutual interests in Wikipedia and the War on Terror helping them stake out common ground. They married – quietly – but their romance was soon propelled into the public's eye, after thieves fired several .22-calibre bullets into the groom's family home.

Today, for the first time, they talk about their marriage, the break-in, and overcoming prejudice – including a suspicion that Mr. Boyle was a spy. A rally outside an abortion clinic, they said, also helped bring them together.

“I love research,” Mr. Boyle, who has worked at the University of Toronto library, told The Globe and Mail. He chronicles Canadian counterterrorism investigations in his spare time. “Anything related to terrorism on Wikipedia,” he said, “I wrote, pretty much.”

The Web encyclopedia urges volunteers to post on matters that interest them. Mr. Boyle's interest in national security led him to e-mail Ms. Khadr last year – to introduce himself and offer support.

He began turning up at bail hearings for one of her jailed brothers, Abdullah, who faces extradition for allegedly running guns to al-Qaeda.

A friendship formed but Ms. Khadr's inner circle was wary. “Her lawyers advised her that I was likely working with CSIS and the RCMP to investigate her,” said Mr. Boyle. The family's defence team has spent years probing the unseen hands of clandestine agencies in their ongoing investigations of the Khadr family. And their notion didn't arrive from out of the blue.

Mr. Boyle say he actually does meet with CSIS and police. He explains he started doing so after meeting Ms. Khadr, to assure authorities that they are not threats. “We don't discuss personal details and family lives. We discuss the larger issues,” he said.

The skeptical defence lawyers, he added, “only agreed I was not working with CSIS or the RCMP when they were informed of the wedding.”

The pair had to get past their wildly different upbringings. The exploits of the bride's so-called “al-Qaeda family” are well known.

As for Mr. Boyle, he was raised by fundamentalist Christians in Ontario. He is the son of a tax lawyer, Patrick C. Boyle, promoted to the bench two years ago by the Conservatives.

The friendship took an important step last fall as Ms. Khadr staged a hunger strike on Parliament Hill. The idea was to raise awareness about another brother, Omar, detained in Guantanamo Bay.

During her protest, Ms. Khadr and Mr. Boyle stopped in on another just down the road: a pro-life rally outside the Mortgentaler Clinic. That was where she met her eventual mother-in-law, Linda Boyle.

“It was nice,” recalled Ms. Khadr. She suspects the middle-aged Catholic Mom had never seen a Muslim woman in a full niqab before, but feels the encounter went well – since everyone was uniformly against abortion.

That left Mr. Boyle to ingratiate himself to Zaynab's mother, Maha Elsamnah. “I had met with her a couple of times just to talk about her husband,” he said. “So it wasn't strange for her to come out.”

He proposed in December. Shortly after New Year's, Zaynab Khadr and Joshua Boyle had their marriage certified at Toronto City Hall. An intimate ceremony followed.

The newlyweds kept things quiet at first. Then, the March break-in at the Boyle family's log cabin outside Ottawa ruptured their aspirations to anonymity. The unsolved crime generated much speculation, and to this day Mr. Boyle said he can't say why someone broke into his parents' home.

Nothing valuable was taken, but Mr. Boyle told The Globe some Khadr-family documents were stolen, including identity cards belonging to the father-in-law he never met. (The Pakistani Army killed Ahmed Said Khadr in 2003).

He says he acquired those items during his ongoing research, regarding them as historic memorabilia. Several bullets, he said, were fired into the empty house's doors and windows, but only after the break-in. Life is getting back to normal. Mr. Boyle is a stepdad now.

Safia Khadr, conceived a decade ago in Afghanistan, never spent much time with her Yemeni birth father. Her parents broke up before Ms. Khadr returned to Canada.

The nine-year-old likes her life – including the arrival of “Josh.” “He's the horsie,” she said. “… I like to pretend his hair is the reins and I pull it.”