City raid tied to Islamic State

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This article was published 05/06/2015 (4061 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RCMP raided a Charleswood home Thursday, reportedly investigating a man who has publicly admitted being an Islamic State supporter.

The 23-year-old man uses the alias Harun Abdurahman and openly shared his radical support for IS in a February 2015 interview with the Toronto Star.

Thursday, RCMP officers used a search warrant to enter a two-storey house at 70 Carlotta Cres. and remained there for several hours, said Sgt. Bert Pacquet.

“There is a strong police presence to ensure the safety of the public and of our officers,” he told the Free Press.

The identification and canine units were at the house Thursday morning and traffic in the area was temporarily blocked. Officers were later seen removing what appeared to be two computers from the home.

Pacquet said he couldn’t comment on the nature of the investigation because it’s still in the early stages. Police haven’t released any information about Abdurahman, nor have they confirmed the search involved him. CBC reported Thursday it is the home of a known IS supporter.

Neighbours told the Free Press they’d noticed undercover officers in unmarked vehicles near the house for long periods of time in recent weeks, and that the homeowner may have been renting a room to a young man.

Rob White, a neighbour, told the Free Press his routine garbage/recycling day took an unexpected turn when he came face-to-face with a police officer as he collected his bins.

“I went to get my recycling bin from the curb and an RCMP officer with a rifle in his hands said, ‘Sir, go back in your home until we tell you to come out.’ So I phoned my boss and said I’m going to be kind of late. Then I put the news on and there was an aerial shot of the area so I texted it to my boss so he could see why!”

White said he had seen, but didn’t know, a young man who lived at the house.

“We knew he lived there but that’s about it. We know the single mother and two kids, she’s really friendly. We didn’t know it was a tenant, we thought it was her son,” said White.

“We saw him coming and going but he was always very quiet. He was a 20-year-old kid, they don’t really start conversations, right?”

Amarnath Amarasingam, an Ontario-based researcher studying radicalization and foreign fighters at the University of Waterloo and Dalhousie University, said he has monitored Abdurahman’s Twitter account for months and has been in contact with Abdurahman’s father, who could not be reached on Thursday by the Free Press.

Abdurahman has had at least six Twitter accounts suspended, Amarasingam said, and it’s clear he was plugged in to a pro-Islamic State network, often using one of the terrorist group’s battle cries, “Baqiya,” which means “enduring” in Arabic. He was in touch with other IS supporters around the world, some of whom have been arrested.

“From what I could tell, he wasn’t really making threats to Canada in any real way; at least, I never saw any of those kinds of comments… but with Bill C-51, it is technically possible to be arrested or charged with the promotion of terrorism just by social-media activity,” Amarasingam told the Free Press Thursday night.

“It’ll be interesting to see if they go that route with Harun, because he’ll literally be the first test case for this promotion-of-terrorism angle.”

Bill C-51, which was passed in the House of Commons last month, makes promoting terrorist activities a Criminal Code offence, punishable by up to five years in prison.

Amarasingam said the legislation is “a bit problematic” because of its broad interpretation of promoting terrorism.

“The amount of people that (Bill C-51) would round up… would be quite high. We’re following very young kids in Toronto, 13- and 14-year-old kids who are very pro-ISIS online. So I wouldn’t really want a 13- or 14-year-old kid facing legal action of some kind just for a tweet or a Facebook post. Going down that route opens some fairly scary doors, and I don’t know if that’s the wise thing to do. It’s much more productive, I think, to get the community involved and get the legislators and social workers and youth workers involved to try to talk to these kids and find a pro-social way to address their political and religious grievances than to simply throw them in jail or put them in a system where now they have a criminal record.”

The Toronto Star interview said Harun Abdurahman was born in Ontario to a Christian family steeped in military tradition, but neither his father, a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force in Alberta, nor his brother know how to turn around the young man who is now living in Winnipeg and has become an unapologetic supporter of the IS terrorist group.

Abdurahman, who agreed in the interview to be identified only by an online pseudonym, said all Muslims should emigrate to Syria and Iraq, where the Islamic State has declared a caliphate governed by Sharia law.

He said he believed last fall’s attacks on Parliament Hill and in Quebec were “justified” retribution for Canadian military aggression against IS.

“I think a lot of Canadians need to wake up and understand that we’re doing this and worse to other people in other countries,” said Abdurahman.

— with files from Ashley Prest, Nick Martin

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca