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1989-1995: Mubin Shaikh is a member of the Royal Canadian Army Cadets. He attains the ranks of Corporal, Sergeant, Warrant Officer, Drill Sergeant Major, Staff Instructor.
May 1995: Mubin turns away from his secular life and embraces Islam.
2002: CSIS first comes across Fahim Ahmad communicating online with jihadists in Alberta.
April 2002 - March 2004: Mubin living in Syria.
March 2004: Mubin returns from a two-year stay in Syria.
March 29, 2004: Momim Khawaja is arrested in Ottawa. He is the first Canadian charged under Canada's new anti-terrorism laws.
Mubin Shaikh knows the Khawaja family and calls CSIS to offer his opinion that they are not a family with extremist views. A CSIS agent meets him at a Tim Horton's restaurant and decides that Mubin could be valuable in providing information about various individuals of concern in the Muslim community.
Fall 2004: CSIS agents take notice of Fahim Ahmad and Zacharia Amara on a website called Clearguidance.com, where anti-western ideology is shared among some of the participants.
February 26, 2005: In Atlanta, Georgia, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 18, resident of Roswell, Georgia, buys two Greyhound bus tickets for himself and Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, of Dawsonville, Georgia.
March 6, 2005: Together, Ahmed and Sadequee take a bus to Toronto, Ontario. They spent six days in the Toronto area with at least three people under surveillance by anti-terrorism authorities, including Fahim Ahmad and Jahmaal James.
They discuss suitable targets to attacks, including military bases and oil storage facilities and refineries. They talk about disrupting the global positioning system. According to one law enforcement official, they thought this plan would wreak havoc over the skies of Atlanta. It turns out what they thought was a GPS system was, in fact, controlling CNN's main broadcast uplink.
They also coordinate plans to travel to Pakistan in order to receive
military training at a training camp run by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, a
group allied with Al Qaeda, whose cause is the liberation of
the disputed region of Kashmir.
April 2005: Now back in the Atlanta area, Syed Haris
Ahmed and "Shifa" Sadequee
travel in Haris' pick-up truck to the Washington DC area. They
make digital video recordings of the World Bank Headquarters, the Masonic
temple in Alexandria, Virginia, an oil storage facility close to
the I-95 highway.
Between April 2005 and October 2005: Shifa Sadequee sends the Washington area videos to the computer hacker and internet expert Younis Tsouli. Better known by his internet moniker Irhabi 007, he is notorious for spreading violent videos like beheadings in Iraq, and covertly disseminating terrorist "how-to" videos and manuals to Muslim youth around the world via the internet.
July 2005: Sayid Haris Ahmed travels to Pakistan. He is alleged to have gone to Pakistan to attend an Islamic School, and then attend a training camp run by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.
July 7, 2005: Four suicide bombers kill 52 commuters in a coordinated attack on London, England's public transport system. The four bombers are not part of an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell. They are British citizens or residents of long standing.
August 18, 2005: Shifa Sadequee travels to Bangladesh. On a stopover at New York's JFK airport, he is interviewed by a federal agent about his trip to Toronto last March. Sadequee says he traveled alone and that he stayed with his Canadian aunt.
August 19, 2005: Syed Haris Ahmed returns to Atlanta from Pakistan. Federal agents question him at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. He contradicts Sadequee's interview from the day before by saying he traveled to Toronto with his friend Shifa, and that they stayed with friends, not Sadequee's aunt.
October 2005: In the United Kingdom, Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi 007, is arrested and later charged with eight terrorism related offences including conspiracy to commit murder. When authorities raid his home, they find digital video clips of Washington monuments they believe were made by the two Atlanta men. Also retrieved on Tsouli's computer are details of how to make a car bomb, videos of training camps, and beheading videos.
November 2005: Mubin Shaikh, working for CSIS on various intelligence tasks, is asked to infiltrate a local group allegedly led by Fahim Ahmad. Mubin shows Fahim his license to acquire and posses a weapon.
Jahmaal James of Toronto goes to Pakistan to get married.
Late December 2005: Mubin leads some of the Toronto 18 to Cooper's Falls, two hours north of Toronto. A dozen members of the alleged terror cell spend more than ten days conducting military training exercises with real and paintball guns. The RCMP has the camp under surveillance.
February 2006: Mubin and Fahim meet Zacharia Amara in a park in Mississauga. He shows them a cellphone-activated detonator he is making.
Government investigators gain access to Zacharia Amara's apartment and discover he is in the advanced stages of making his detonator with his cell phone.
Mubin, Fahim Ahmad, and others drive over ten hours north again to Opasatika. On this trip the vehicle is wired with surveillance devices by investigators. Mubin says that they looked for a good location to set up a Chechnya-style resistance at a safe house complete with snipers and booby-traps, accommodating the Toronto group and their Atlanta contacts.
March 23, 2006: Syed Haris Ahmed is arrested in Atlanta and charged with conspiring to and providing material support to terrorists.
April 2006: Shifa Sadequee is arrested in Dhaka, Bangladesh by government agents and returned to the United States. He is charged with the same terrorism laws as Syed Haris Ahmed.
Spring 2006: Fahim Ahmad is seen handing out jihadi videos outside the Salahaddin Mosque in Scarborough.
Zacharia Amara and other alleged members of the cell change focus from the safe house and training camps to blowing up targets in downtown Toronto. Amara and other accused from Mississauga want to acquire 3 tons of ammonium nitrate and other chemical ingredients used to make explosives. They start talking about using cube vans to blow up the Toronto CSIS Office on Front Street, the Toronto Stock Exchange on King Street, and a military establishment.
Shareef Abdelhaleem, 30, another Mississauga resident, becomes more involved in helping Amara acquire bomb making ingredients. Amara gives Abdelhaleem money to purchase ingredients to make explosives. Abdelhaleem pays a police informant close to $2000 as a down payment for ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be used to make explosives.
Unbeknownst to Mubin Shaikh, a second police informant has entered the police investigation. He is an agricultural student, from a prominent Egyptian family in the Toronto area, who worked for Air Canada at one point. Sources say that his degree in agricultural engineering gave him access to purchase large amounts of ammonium nitrate.
Unlike Mubin Shaikh, the second mole entered the witness protection program out of concerns for his safety and privacy.
The police replace the ammonium nitrate with a harmless substance which is delivered to the warehouse in Newmarket, Ontario.
Mohammed Dirie and Yasim Abdi Mohamed, also charged, are already in jail serving time for smuggling weapons into Canada from the U.S. in August 2005. (see a CBC.ca photogallery of the raid)
August 3, 2006: The eighteenth suspect is arrested in connection with attending the training camp in December 2005. Ibrahim Aboud, of Mississauga, is arrested without incident at his Mississauga home.
August 25, 2006: Ibrahim Aboud is released on bail.
So far he is the fifth suspect to be released pending his trial. Aboud,
Ahmad Ghany, also of Mississauga, and three youths, have been released
on bail.
January 15, 2007: In Brampton, outside of Toronto,
preliminary hearings begin for four of the youths arrested last summer.
February 23, 2007: Charges against the youngest suspect are stayed in a Brampton courtroom. This means the charges are withdrawn, but can be reactivated within a year if the Crown wishes to proceed.
July 31, 2007: Charges are stayed against two of the other youths.
September 24, 2007: The Deputy Attorney General of Canada takes the unusual step to stop the adult’s preliminary hearing and go straight to trial.
October 22, 2007: Steven Chand of Scarborough Ontario, is denied bail.
November 5, 2007: Qayyum Abdul Jamal is granted bail and the most serious charge against him - planning to cause a deadly explosion - is dropped.
March 25, 2008: The trial of the one remaining youth suspects begins in a courtroom in Brampton, Ont. The accused, who was 18 at the time of his arrest and cannot be named under the terms of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, pleaded not guilty.
April 15, 2008: Crown prosecutors stayed proceedings against four more suspects: Ahmad Mustafa Ghany, Ibrahim Aboud, Yasim Abdi Mohammed and Quayyum Abdul Jamal- the oldest accused who was portrayed early on the as the group's ringleader.
Runs:
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