The Globe and Mail rolls out some background into the case of Canadian-born software developer Mohammad Momin Khawaja who was the first Canadian to be charged under Canada's anti-terrorism law - A deadly gadget made in Canada:
Five years ago, spies began intercepting e-mails referring to a remote-control detonator in the making. Police in Britain and North America went on alert, teaming up to ensure that whatever this "Digimonster" was, it was never used to trigger a bomb.
In time, alleged prototypes were seized. It was an innocuous looking piece of circuitry, containing antennae, signal jammers and Duracell batteries, and no great feat of electronic engineering. The significance lay in the fact that it was allegedly assembled with the intention of changing the world violently.
Prosecutors in Britain have discussed the device at length, suggesting the finished product was to have been shipped to London. The British Crown has said terrorists would have pushed a button, sending a radio signal a few hundred metres toward a receiver - sparking the Digimonster.
Attached to a potent package, the device would have set off a detonator, igniting up to 600 kilograms of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer - the same substance used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
In March, 2004, hundreds of officers swept across Britain, thwarting the scheme after finding fertilizer stashed in a suburban London storage shed. British conspirators had been secretly taped talking about bombing the busiest nightclub in London. "If you went for the social structure where every Tom, Dick and Harry goes on a Saturday night that would be crazy, crazy thing," said one suspect. Another asserted female club-goers were "slags" - British vernacular for "sluts" - who deserved to die.
Also caught on tape were remarks about payback for British incursions into Muslim lands, and stated hopes of inspiring a British pullout from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Five conspirators in their 20s each got sentences of nearly 20 years.
Still, a loose end dangles in Ottawa. The British Crown said the detonator design was Canadian, and the RCMP arrested a 24-year-old computer programmer a few hours before the British arrests.
And that man, Mohammad Momin Khawaja, is a week away from hearing direct allegations that he is the brains behind the Digimonster. Not indicted in Britain, he was often mentioned there as a co-conspirator who spent months tinkering with electronics in his bedroom in his parents' suburban Ottawa house, giving the device its name (a possible reference to the Digimon TV cartoon) and calling it his "baby" in e-mails to London.
Facing life imprisonment, Mr. Khawaja remains the first test case of Canada's Antiterrorism Act, which has yet to result in a single conviction since it was passed by Parliament in 2001.
It's no BlackBerry, but in its own ominous way "The Hi-Fi Digimonster" may rank among the more significant made-in-Canada communications gadgets of our time. And it makes its public Canadian debut in a much-anticipated terrorism trial, beginning in Ottawa next week.
