IN DEPTH: TORONTO BOMB PLOT CASE
Background: Mubin Shaikh
CBC News Online | July 15, 2006
Mubin Shaikh is an observant Muslim and activist for Shariah law in Ontario. He was born in Toronto, the son of immigrant parents who came to Canada in the 1970s.
He was also a paid police informant who helped infiltrate a group of 17 Muslim men and youth now charged with orchestrating a terrorist plot targeting Toronto and Ottawa.
On July 13, 2006, Shaikh spoke to Linden McIntyre of CBC's The Fifth Estate.
Shaikh speaks with the accent and inflection of a young man born and raised in multicultural Toronto, but wears the long beard and grey robes of a devout Muslim.
Mubin Shaikh spoke exclusively to Linden McIntyre of CBC's The Fifth Estate. (CBC)
The contrast between the way he looks and the way he sounds reveals something about the environment where he grew up.
Shaikh attended public schools in Toronto and as a teenager lived a typical high school life, he said.
"We were just the coolest guys in school. The cheerleaders were our girlfriends, and so the sportos, they hated us, the jocks, because we're the potheads out on the corner there," he said.
In his late teens, Shaikh became a devout follower of Islam because, he said, he was "burned out" from the life he was living.
Shaikh said people began to treat him differently, as an identifiable Muslim, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., and it nearly drove him to become a militant himself.
"I remember specifically being at that stage where I was ready to go to Chechnya, I was ready to go to Afghanistan. I wanted to do some jihad-oriented thing," he said. "But I was lucky that I was exposed to people who I could talk to, who could correct my understanding."
Shaikh became a well-known figure in Toronto's Muslim community as an official at the Al-Noor Mosque, where he ran the Al-Noor Arbitration Centre.
He was also a prominent proponent of the failed attempt to introduce Shariah law, Islamic religious code, to Ontario to settle family law matters.
His involvement with CSIS began when he returned to Canada in 2004 after spending two years in Syria. Shaikh read in a newspaper that Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a man he had grown up with, had been arrested on terrorism changes. Khawaja was the first person arrested under new anti-terrorism laws in Canada.
Shaikh contacted CSIS and spoke on Khawaja's behalf, asking if he could provide any information to help.
"They put to me the prospect of working with them, giving information on certain people, certain groups, getting close to leaders of certain groups, talking to them, seeing what kind of views they had and reporting on those views," he said.
Shaikh said he was ideal for job of informant because he was born and raised in Canada, but also has a solid foundation in Islam.
"Toronto's home, so I understand what concerns they have, but at the same time as a Muslim, I understand what concerns Muslims have. So I felt that I could be a link between the two sides," he said.
Shaikh said he consulted Muslim religious leaders before joining the CSIS investigation as a paid informant and they gave him their blessing.
'Time bomb waiting to go off''
In October 2005, Shaikh was instructed to infiltrate a group of young Muslims that CSIS had been tracking. He went a meeting in a Toronto banquet hall, where he was approached by one of the men, who asked him about his commitment to jihad.
"I told him exactly what he wanted to hear," he said.
"I got pulled over to the side. They gave me the lines, what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan. They're raping our women, killing our children, and that's the thing, the emotional things that they use," Shaikh said.
Shaikh said the man urged the young Muslim men there to take action, to take their anger and emotion and do something with it.
"My comment to my CSIS handler at that time afterwards was, 'This guy is an effing time bomb waiting to go off.'"
Shaikh told them of the six years he spent as a member of the Royal Canadian Army Cadets and the weapons and survival training he received with the Canadian Armed Forces reserves.
Because of his experience in the Canadian military and martial arts training, Shaikh said the group asked him to direct a guerrilla combat training program in Washago, Ont., north of Toronto.
The training camp took place over the Christmas holiday, just two months after Shaikh met the group in the banquet hall. Police allege they used real guns and paintball guns to train in combat techniques and target practice.
Plot a violation of values
However, he said he was not aware of all the group's activities. He said he found out about their plot to acquire ammonium nitrate to build explosives shortly before it was made public.
"It just shocked me. Blew me away, pardon the pun," he said. "It was fake [ammonium nitrate] that they had, but still, they were trying to procure that kind of stuff."
Shaikh said it was then that any doubts he had about infiltrating the group were gone.
"To err on the side of caution, I would have to say that they are fruitcakes … but with the capacity to do real damage," he said.
Shaikh said his interests in infiltrating the alleged bomb plot were to stop a violation of fundamental Islamic values and to protect the reputation of Islam and Muslims, even above Canadian interests.
"God says in the Qu'ran, you save one life justly it is as if you've saved all of humankind," he said. "I don't need reinterpretations or context. It's straight up. That's it."
Shaikh declined formal protection as a court witness and went public with his role in the investigation, he said, after members of the Muslim community urged him to do so. He said he was working for the safety of Canadians and Muslims, not for the police.
If the plot to set off explosives in Toronto and Ottawa were allowed to happen, Shaikh said, Muslims would have suffered more than anyone else, other than those killed in the attacks.
"That's what people have to understand because now, a guy like me, who's an agent of the state, responsible for bringing these guys down, I'm still called a terrorist in the street," he said.
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