A Toronto security guard on trial for allegedly attempting to join the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabab said he believed it was his religious duty to do so, an undercover police officer testified on Tuesday.
“It’s the ultimate sacrifice you can make for your religion,” Mohamed Hassan Hersi said, according to the testimony of the officer, whose identity cannot be disclosed to due a publication ban. “Basically it’s God’s will.”
Three years after Mr. Hersi was arrested at Toronto’s Pearson Airport as he was about to board flights to London and Cairo, his trial is now underway and jurors are hearing from the undercover officer who befriended the Somali-Canadian.
The trial comes amid concern over the radicalization of Canadians — dozens of whom have joined Islamist terror groups in the Middle East and Africa. Al-Shabab was behind last year’s massacre at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi that left two Canadians dead.
A 28-year-old Canadian who grew up in Toronto, Mr. Hersi came to the attention of police in September 2010 when an employee of a Toronto dry cleaning business found a USB device in a bag of clothes, according to a statement of “agreed facts” released by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
The dry cleaner turned the jump drive over to Toronto police, which found it contained a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, a Canadian Forces Department of National Defense Operational Manual and reports from Intercon Security, where Mr. Hersi worked.
In the months that followed, police planted an undercover officer close to Mr. Hersi. The officer testified that at a meeting in January in the Scarborough Town Centre parking lot, he asked Mr. Hersi how he knew he wanted to join Al-Shabab.
“Here everything is anti-prayer, anti-Islam … even if it’s a tyrannical place, it’s better than Canada,” he said. “I want to live in a place that’s better than this.” Somalia was better than Canada, he said, “because you can live in a place where there’s Islamic law.”
In his rambling conversations, he decried what he considered Canada’s hostility to his faith, claiming that “all non-Muslims hate Islam.” But he appeared to display intolerance himself, saying that “talking to a non-Muslim about morality and shit, they don’t even know what morality is, Christians.”
He also complained that “brothers” at Toronto’s Salahedin mosque had been arrested on security certificates (used to deport foreign nationals deemed threats to Canada’s security), and said nobody cared because only Muslims were affected. Asked how he knew, he said, “My imam talks about it.”
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