“Disaffected youth” of a particular ideological bent. “Plot began in chat room,” from the Toronto Star, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
…So when a shadowy group of disaffected urban youth began talking in an Internet chat room in the fall of 2004 espousing anti-Western views, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was listening.
The spy agency, and an alphabet soup of other security agencies across the continent, closely monitor such sites, where talk may sometimes turn to buildings and bombs and bringing global jihad home to North America, to Canada.
Often it’s just that “” talk “” but when CSIS began monitoring the sites allegedly used by some of the 17 men and youths arrested on terrorism-related charges in a sweeping series of raids across the GTA Friday evening, the Canadian spy agency heard enough to remain interested, and increased surveillance of the group….
Four months after the surveillance began, two Americans, from the Atlanta, Ga., area, popped onto the radar.
Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee had been communicating by email with the Canadian group, investigators allege, and in March 2005 the two hopped on a Greyhound bus, paying $280 (U.S.) for two round-trip tickets to Toronto, where, according to U.S. court documents, they were to meet with “like-minded Islamists.”
“According to Ahmed … they met regularly with at least three subjects of an FBI international terrorism investigation,” the court documents allege, and discussed “strategic locations in the United States suitable for a terrorist strike.”…
For neighbours of the 10 men and five juveniles who appeared in Brampton court Saturday “” Yasin Abdi Mohamed and Ali Dirie, in prison in Kingston, did not appear “” the arrests and charges came mostly as a shock.
They talked of quiet men, religious men, who played basketball and went to school and looked for jobs, of an elder who mentored younger men, but mostly, of men who kept to themselves, coming and going silently to and from their homes in Mississauga and Toronto.