TORONTO — A father's curiosity trumped all else on the day he decided to ransack his 15-year-old son's room. He swept through the young man's desk, shelf and closet in the family's Scarborough apartment, silently praying his suspicions wouldn't be confirmed.
The smoking gun he found that day wasn't a girlie magazine or sandwich bag filled with marijuana, but a copy of the Koran on a CD-ROM.
At the time, the devout Hindu thought he'd been struck with the worst kind of parental disappointment. But five years later, after spending $30 a day driving to and from a courthouse in Brampton to watch his son go through Canada's first terrorism trial, he has endured a worse fate - the experience of losing his son.
Although he has sat just 10 or so metres away in court from the young man, now 20, a religious gulf separates them.
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In recent interviews with Muslim mentors, including an imam the young man clandestinely visited, and with his father, who believes his son was brainwashed, there emerges a picture of a muddled young man caught in an intense tug of war.
On one side, he seeks to please his strict, sometimes harshly disciplinarian father and on the other, to follow his own flawed interpretation of Islam.
His religious guides - at least the ones who aren't his co-accused in the so-called Toronto 18 - agreed he was ignorant of Islam.
"He's a kid who doesn't know very much, if at all, about the religion," said Muhammad Robert Heft, who was approached by the young man at Paradise For Ever, a non-profit centre he runs in Toronto for recent Muslim converts.
Mr. Heft was even more dismissive of the suggestion that the young man could be a terrorist. "I think if you ask the real terrorists in the world, they'd feel insulted, that he was nothing more than a Mickey Mouse kid who was venting some of his frustrations and talking," he said.
At an alleged terrorist training camp in December, 2005, the young man peppered RCMP mole Mubin Shaikh with questions about Islam, but Mr. Shaikh testified later that they "never ... indicated to me any reflective thought."
Raised in the Hindu faith in Scarborough, where ethnic grocery stores stack bags of cassava chips alongside brass statues of Hindu deity Lord Ganesha, the teenager made a transition to Islam that was unexpected and tumultuous.
After emigrating from war-torn Sri Lanka in 1994, the family of deeply devoted Hindus made weekly trips to local Hindu temples, said the young man's father. The first sign his son was drifting away from the faith was when the school principal called, telling him his son had been asking to use the Muslim prayer room in the school.
The father was baffled: Each week his son followed the family to temple, a place teeming with people kneeling before the statues of deities and spreading holy ash across their foreheads. The school principal was surely mistaken, he thought. But then he searched his son's room. When he found a CD-ROM version of the Koran, he warned the then-15-year-old to stay away from his Muslim classmates.
"By force they were taking him," the father said in a mix of Tamil and English, a translator at his side. "At that time itself I would've alerted police and he would've been saved."
But the young man's younger sister - the only family member the father said his son acknowledges in court - sympathizes with him.
"I think he was searching for God. He was confused, I guess," she said. "My parents don't understand. It's his decision ... I just wanted him to be careful."
The young man's father persuaded the principal to seal off the prayer room, thinking that once the meeting place disappeared, so would the conversion process. But that only made his son seek out a new hangout: the Salaheddin Islamic Centre. It was here that an imam at the mosque, Aly Hindy, said the young man got to know many of his co-accused in the Toronto 18, including the alleged ringleader.
