OTTAWA — A remote-control device seized from the family home of Momin Khawaja was in working order and was capable of being used to trigger a homemade bomb, says an RCMP expert on electronics and explosives.
Sgt. Sylvain Fiset told Mr. Khawaja's terrorism trial Wednesday that the device – dubbed the Hi-Fi Digimonster – would have had a range of up to 300 metres as originally conceived.
But his analysis indicated that the maker later modified the design to include a new antenna, likely with the hope of increasing the range.
“In fact, the tests [carried out by the RCMP]showed it had the reverse effect, the range was decreased,” said Sgt. Fiset.
When outfitted with the new antenna, the Digimonster had a range of 200 metres in an open field and of no more than 100 metres in densely built and heavily populated areas.
The device included an amplifier that, in theory, could have boosted its range to one or two kilometres, said Sgt. Fiset said it was improperly installed and wasn't getting the job done.
Nevertheless, he concluded, the Digimonster would have functioned adequately within its reduced range.
In a follow-up discussion of homemade bombs – known in technical jargon as improvised explosive devices – Sgt. Fiset noted they can be triggered in any number of ways.
A mechanical timer or trip-wire would be two crude examples, he said. More sophisticated equipment that could be used to send an electrical signal to set off an IED would include a pager or cell phone, or “it could be a device like the Hi-Fi Digimonster,” said Sgt. Fiset.
He said he built and tested two duplicates of the Digimonster based on diagrams, photographs and electronic components discovered by the Mounties when they raided the Khawaja house in March of 2004.
Sgt. Fiset explained that he didn't want to take a chance of testing the actual device that was seized in the raid, for fear it would be damaged if something went wrong.
He estimated the duplicates he constructed were “95 to 99 per cent” identical to the original. But a written report entered in evidence Wednesday indicated Sgt. Fiset may have taken some liberties.
He noted in the report that some of the original materials were of “meagre” quality and some of the soldering jobs were “fragile” in nature. He used better materials and soldering in building the duplicates.
Mr. Khawaja faces seven charges including financing and facilitating terrorism, but the central allegation is that he built a remote-controller for use in bomb attacks planned by Islamic extremists in Britain.
Five of his alleged co-conspirators were convicted by a London jury and sentenced last year to life in prison. Their potential targets were said to include a nightclub, shopping centre and electrical and gas facilities, but the plot was broken up by British police and security forces before any damage was done.
The evidence offered by Sgt. Fiset is a key part of the effort by federal prosecutors to tie Mr. Khawaja to the bomb plot. But the presentation has been highly technical, sparking some frustration on the part of Justice Douglas Rutherford, who is trying the case without a jury in Ontario Superior Court.
“It might as well be a foreign language,” Judge Rutherford observed at one point as Sgt. Fiset attempted to explain a fine point.
He later reiterated the point in sharper fashion, this time addressing himself to chief Crown attorney David McKercher.
“If you're going to go through this kind of technical information you've got to do it in a way I can understand,” said the judge. “I'm sorry, I didn't take any electronics courses.”
That intervention was followed by a lengthy session in which Sgt. Fiset tried to explain, in laymen's terms, the mysteries of printed circuit boards, hard wiring, diodes, capacitors, power regulators and a variety of other components.
The Digimonster was essentially a series of circuit boards that could be strung together to form an encoder, transmitter, decoder and receiver.
The components were found by the RCMP in the bedroom of Qasim Khawaja, Momin's older brother. Schematic diagrams of the device were recovered from the hard drives of computers used by both Qasim and Momin.
Qasim is not on trial and has never been charged with any criminal offence, though his name has surfaced repeatedly in the court proceedings.
Momin, by contrast, is alleged to have been in close contact with Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the British bomb plot.
The two were surreptitiously recorded by the British security service MI-5 discussing remote-control technology in February 2004, and Momin boasted in a later e-mail that he could build up to 30 devices once he solved some technical problems.
