http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rcmp-using-new-measures-to-stop-high-risk-travellers/article20712700/?cmpid=rss1&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheGlobeAndMail-National+%28The+Globe+and+Mail+-+National+News%29
RCMP
using new measures to stop ‘high-risk travellers’
COLIN FREEZE AND CARRIE TAIT
The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Sep. 19 2014, 10:03 PM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Sep. 20 2014, 7:19 AM EDT
Ali Abubaker and Naomi Mahdere were talented teenagers. He was a hip-hop
poet, riffing about inequality and injustice; she was a polished singer,
mimicking pop stars such as Beyonce. In 2011, Ms. Mahdere won a talent
competition put on by Calgary’s Afrikadey Arts & Culture Society. Mr.
Abubaker placed second.
Ms. Madhere, now 19, wanted to study biochemistry and become a doctor. Mr.
Abubaker, now 22, was studying civil engineering at Mount Royal University.
At some point, a romantic relationship between the two blossomed. Ms.
Mahdere, an Eritrean-Christian by heritage, converted to Islam. Those who
knew Mr. Abubaker, whose parents hailed from Eritrea and the Philippines,
were alarmed by his religious stridency, which began surfacing in his
poetry.
Ms. Mahdere’s mother became so concerned about Mr. Abubaker’s views on
Islam that she called the RCMP’s national security team last year. She told
investigators she believed her daughter and her boyfriend were going to
Syria to fight in the war. The couple applied for new passports in October,
2013, wanting the paperwork rushed. In November, they presented passport
officials with one-way tickets to London, England.
That’s when the police stepped in. Working with Passport Canada officials,
they picked up Mr. Abubaker, Ms. Mahdere and their friend Hamza Omer, on
charges of passport fraud, keeping them grounded in Canada and off a flight
to London. All three pleaded guilty. Their combined fines will likely total
around $3,000 – a small sum considering the Crown prosecutor argued their
actions could have brought the integrity of the entire Canadian passport
system into disrepute.
The couple – who couldn’t be reached through lawyers, listed addresses or
family members – have paid their dues, and are still together. But the case
remains important: not just because of what the Mounties allege they could
prove, but because of what they couldn’t.
Without the ability to amass the proof beyond doubt they need to lay more
serious charges, officials are increasingly leaning on other measures and
investigative partners for help to disrupt “high-risk travellers” from
getting on planes.
The threat of homegrown terrorism isn’t new, but the manner in which the
RCMP zeroed in on this couple represents a fresh gambit in the fight to
identify and stop prospective terrorist recruits before they leave Canada.
These techniques, which have attracted the ire of civil liberties
advocates, are being deployed amid a growing sense of urgency: Officials
are warning that more than 100 Canadians are suspected of involvement in
terrorism activities around the world.
“Into that fanaticism”
Tunde Dawodu, who works at building a sense of pan-African identity among
creative Calgary youth through the annual Afrikadey weeklong festival, met
Mr. Abubaker around 2010. And he has known Ms. Mahdere since she was a
little girl. Mr. Abubaker, he said, was a talented artist, but his poems
increasingly included religious terms like Allahu Akbar – Arabic for God is
great.
Mr. Dawodu worried about the teenager and tried to talk to him about it.
“He was just too much into that fanaticism,” Mr. Dawodu said in an
interview in Afrikadey’s basement office in Calgary.
Mr. Abubaker, in the program guide for the 2011 festival, described his
poetry with a softer spin. “Speaking and writing about the injustice, that
is what inspires me,” Mr. Abubaker said.
Ms. Mahdere described the “rush” she felt when singing in front of an
audience. “You go on stage and at first you are nervous, but then you start
to feel comfortable and you can really feed off the energy the crowd is
giving you,” she said in her bio.
In the accompanying photo, Ms. Mahdere is wearing a denim vest, short skirt
and fringed boots. Her Facebook profile photo, prior to being removed this
week, featured a woman in black niqab with only her eyes visible.
The pair is now “married under Islamic sharia,” according to court
documents.
Mr. Dawodu tells a story that shows how Ms. Mahdere’s religious
transformation coincides with her romantic relationship.
Ms. Mahdere phoned him out of the blue last year with an odd request given
she had once wanted to tour the world as a pop singer. She wanted her old
pictures deleted from the Afrikadey’s website. “I don’t want my body to be
exposed,” he recalls her saying.
In the midst of this conversation, an angry man grabbed the phone. “Listen,
this is Naomi’s husband,” the man said, according to Mr. Dawodu. He, too,
demanded the photos be removed.
“He was threatening me with violence,” Mr. Dawodu said. The husband never
identified himself, but Mr. Dawodu recognized the voice as Mr. Abubaker’s.
Undermining “the integrity of the Canadian passport system”
The passport fraud case against Mr. Abubaker and Ms. Mahdere began with a
phone call to the RCMP’s integrated national security team on Oct. 28,
2013. It was her mother.
“Ms. Mahdere’s parents were concerned that Mr. Abubaker and Ms. Mahdere
planned to go to Syria to fight in the war,” prosecutor Steven Johnston
told the court.
The mother’s theory was based on her concerns about “Mr. Abubaker’s
perceived views on Islam.” She noticed her daughter’s debit card had been
used twice on the same day at Passport Canada.
RCMP co-ordinated with Passport Canada. They found that Mr. Abubaker, Ms.
Mahdere and their friend Mr. Omer all relied on the same guarantor as they
sought to rush their passport applications. The RCMP spoke with the
guarantor and determined he did not meet the requirements. He knew neither
Ms. Mahdere nor Mr. Omer and had been out of contact with Mr. Abubaker, who
pushed him to sign all three applications.
This was enough for police to charge the three with passport fraud. “What
Mr. Abubaker and his cohorts did undermines the integrity of the Canadian
passport system,” Mr. Johnston, the prosecutor, told the court. Such
illegal acts could tarnish Canada’s reputation to the point that all
citizens would “end up on visas to travel to the United States.”
Defence lawyers said the three had no intention of going to the Middle
East. Instead, they had planned to attend an Islamic conference in London.
Ms. Mahdere addressed the court during her hearing, disputing any notion
that she and her husband ever harboured “radical views.”
“We follow mainstream Islam, we don’t follow any fringe group or any
extremes,” she said.
“Disrupting” suspects
Police in Canada often talk of “disrupting” potential terrorism suspects,
language that makes civil libertarians nervous. Critics of the RCMP want
police to proceed in open courts. They point out Mounties were faulted by
separate judicial inquiries, in the 1980s and early 2000s, for unlawful
conduct in their fight against terrorism.
“You don’t want some committee in some hidden office in Ottawa making these
kinds of decisions that would interfere with someone’s right to liberty,”
said Paul Cavalluzzo, a lawyer who acted as commission counsel during the
2004 Maher Arar inquiry.
But the Conservative government is promising Canadians that authorities
will get better at preventing terrorism – and the term “high-risk
travellers” (HRT) has gained currency, applied to cases in which officials
are long on fears but short on evidence. A senior Mountie chairs Canada’s
HRT “case management committee,” where security officials meet every few
weeks to discuss who they need to keep off outbound planes.
Superintendent Wade Oldford, the RCMP’s top counterterrorism detective,
says the committee was “born out of necessity,” especially after “the
number of individuals brought to our attention leaving the country started
to increase significantly as the events in Syria started to unfold.”
The police gold standard for any national-security investigation remains
arresting, charging and prosecuting suspects in open court on
Anti-Terrorist Act offences. But when they can’t reach that standard, they
turn to other means. Supt. Oldford, in an interview, gave a hypothetical
example.
“If we knew there was an individual discussing planning to leave Canada for
Syria and we didn’t have enough information to lay a charge,” he said,
“then is there something from a Passport Canada perspective they could do
under their own legislation?”
Follow us on Twitter: Carrie Tait _at_CarrieTait, Colin Freeze _at_colinfreeze
Received on Wed Sep 24 2014 - 11:15:24 EDT