Mohammad Momin Khawaja is a trained terrorist, a terrorist financier and terrorist bomb-builder, a judge ruled this morning, but there was not sufficient evidence to find the suspect knowingly plotted to blow up British targets.
Following a landmark legal marathon, Mr. Justice Douglas Rutherford convicted Mr. Khawaja, laying out the reasoning in a58-page verdict. The Canadian-born al-Qaeda sympathizer was found guilty of the seven terrorist offences he was charged with, though not always to the full extent of what the Crown had alleged.
Mr. Khawaja, a 29-year-old Ottawa resident, was arrested in 2004 while working at his day job of fixing computers for Canada's Foreign Affairs Department. He is only the second man to be convicted under the Anti Terrorism Act, which was passed specifically to cast a wide prosecutorial net after 9/11.
While a young offender was found guilty last month of being a peripheral participant in a terrorist group, it is Mr. Khawaja who can be described a Canada's first true terrorist, as convicted by the 2001 Act.
Judging by the ruling, new laws appear to be doing the job they were intended to do, though some crimes remain difficult to prosecute. “Judge Rutherford clearly gives Mr. Khawaja the benefit of the reasonable doubt,” said University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach.
For example, while the judge found Mr. Khawaja to be an eager member of a U.K.-based terrorist cell, he also found important distinctions arise from the fact that the Canadian was kept out of the loop on specific plans to kill Londoners by bombing U.K. night clubs and shopping malls.
“One wonders why terrorists like [the British cell members ] would share details of such a fertilizer bomb plot with a foreigner like Khawaja, unless it was necessary to do so, and it wasn't,” writes Judge Rutherford in his ruling.
“He seemed willing to help any way he could. Ask him to send money? He did. Ask him to take supplies to … Pakistan? He did. Ask him to build a remote detonator device? He did, or was well into a work in progress.
“…. But his having knowledge of their domestic U.K. bomb plot was not necessary. He wasn't a required link.”
The parsing of Mr. Khawaja's mens rea, or “guilty mind” is the most significant part of the verdict. Outside court, defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon appeared to be upbeat as ever, suggesting it will now be very difficult for prosecutors to seek a life sentence of 25 years at a hearing next month.
“What difference does it make? Huge. Huge,” Mr. Greenspon, said. “...The charges he was convicted of were far less serious.”
Both the Crown and defence said outside court that Mr. Khawaja has likely already served the equivalent of nine years of his eventual penitentiary sentence. Canada generally credits its prisoners two days for every day jailed in pretrial custody, and it's also customary to release most prisoners into halfway houses after they've served two thirds of their sentence.
However Mr. Roach, the law professor, pointed out that terrorist crimes necessarily result in unusually stiff jail sentences. “Parliament seems to be saying they [the counts] shall be served consecutively, rather than concurrently,” he said.
Prior to the trial beginning this June, Mr. Greenspon launched a host of legal challenges to Canada's antiterrorism laws and state-secrecy practices. Very of the little of the actual evidence in the case – which was amassed by Scotland Yard, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service – was ever in dispute.
As Judge Rutherford pointed out, Mr. Khawaja largely established his mindset with his own words, as written in his intercepted emails (which appear below as they were written).
“I always wanted to be a soldier, cuz when I was like five yrs old me mum and I would read story about Ali radiAlla Anhu and how he chopped off the head of Marhab the kafir [infidel] and about jihad and stuff,” reads one of Mr. Khawaja's emails cited by Judge Rutherford.
Another read: “When the kuffar amreekans invaded Afghanistan that was .. the most painful time in my whole life … it would tear my hear knowing these filthy kaafir dog Americans were bombing our muslim bros and sisters … Shaykh Usama bin laden is like the most beloved person to me in the whole world, after Allah.”
