Signs of extremism

Some of the Toronto terror suspects' high school classmates witnessed their conversion to radical Islam firsthand:

[Amin Mohamed] Durrani, who has been charged with training and recruiting for a terrorist group, would often spend time with two younger friends at Stephen Leacock Collegiate who were also taken into custody. "They all hung out together," said Syed.

Some of the youths charged have friends in common who played basketball together at the local mosque. Friends remember Fahim Ahmad — another of the 12 adults arrested — joining the youth at those games.

Durrani and the two younger friends also prayed together at an informal place of worship called Musalla-E-Namira, close to the school, where security guards yesterday were pointing out reporters and warning students not to speak to them.

The modest prayer room is on the top floor of a two-storey plaza, alongside seedy storefronts and dumpsters. Worshippers use a back door that looks more like a warehouse entrance.

Another of the high school friends who went there was a recent convert to Islam, whose parents were apparently upset when they'd caught him praying in the washroom at home and, according to some acquaintances, had an angry confrontation with people at the musalla.

It was there that the friends gathered to listen to fiery sermons by an amir, or preacher, that were full of anti-American talk and literalist interpretations of the Qur'an.

[...]

Although in different grades at their high school, Durrani and the other two — and possibly others from the school — had been "inseparable friends" for a long time.

Inspired by rap music, Durrani dressed in urban gangster style. A second youth was a popular kid, the envy of his friends for dating the school's hottest girl. The third was a bright kid with an interest in sciences, who volunteered with the school's Muslim association.

But some schoolmates said they noticed a drastic change in this group of friends toward the end of 2005. They started skipping school to attend the musalla's lectures, and some started wearing traditional dress.

"Not that there is anything wrong with that," said the source, "because dressing that way, for a good Muslim, makes you humble. But these were guys who were also acting strange."

The popular boy often talked about politics, especially about the 9/11 attacks.

"He talked a lot about the U.S. and manifest destiny and that stuff," said Alex Tang, a student at Stephen Leacock. "But he loves Canada. He'd rather live in Canada than in any place in the world," he added.

The same youth was known for giving great speeches in class.

"His teachers liked him. He talked like a college professor," said Tang. "He probably had all that knowledge from his friends, his parents and his outside schooling."

Liberal MP Wajid Khan had a run-in with one of the accused last year:

Khan realized with a shock on Saturday that he knew one of the accused, or rather, had had an encounter last year with Qayyum Abdul Jamal, the 43-year-old caretaker and frequent radical speaker at Mississauga's Ar-Rahman Islamic Centre.

Khan had been invited to speak at the Islamic centre at a Mississauga strip mall. Jamal was slated to introduce him. But in the process, the avowed fundamentalist launched a verbal attack on Canadian institutions and, in particular, on the deployment of Canadian troops in Afghanistan, where, he said, they were raping the Afghan women.

"It was all kinds of derogatory things," Khan recalls.

"I said, `You're talking a lot of nonsense. The troops are doing a wonderful job there.'

"I told the congregation that this was misinformation and they shouldn't accept it. Then I walked out."

He later learned that some members of the centre were "so upset with Jamal they roughed him up a little, pushed him."

Damian P.

Posted by damian at June 6, 2006 10:54 AM