Confusion, despair from terror suspect isolated in Don Jail - Thomas Walkom

Confusion, despair from terror suspect isolated in Don Jail

Nov 08, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom

Fahim Ahmad has decided to break his silence. Seventeen months after he was arrested and jailed as one of the alleged ringleaders of an alleged plot to blow up buildings and behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the 23-year-old Mississauga man says he remains baffled by the charges. In his first media interview, Ahmad says he is still waiting for the government to produce a snippet of credible evidence to back up its claims.

Ahmad is one of the so-called Toronto 18, a group of Muslim men and boys arrested in a 2006 sweep that made headlines around the world.

At the beginning, the overarching storyline was that police had managed to derail a homegrown terror plot on the scale of the London bombings

Since then, however, the government's case has begun to fray. First, it was revealed that two police informers had played central roles in the alleged plot. One was reportedly paid $4 million
Second, charges against three juveniles were stayed (effectively meaning that they are off the hook).

Then last month, in the midst of testimony from police informer Mubin Shaikh, the government abruptly halted the preliminary hearing into the charges and announced it would go directly to trial – probably sometime next year.

Ahmad and two other accused men have been moved to the Don Jail where – unlike the remaining eight still in custody – they are kept in strict isolation. Exactly why is unclear. The three are allowed to telephone out, so the rule is clearly not designed to prevent them from talking to other alleged militants – or even to the Toronto Star. They just can't talk face to face with live human beings, which Ahmad says is driving him nuts.

"My whole world now is a 6 by 4 by 10 room," he says. "It's become normal in a not very good sense. You wake up and know you will be in this room the whole day. There's no hope of anything. ... It gets to you mentally. You don't know where you're going, how long it's going to take. It drives you crazy."

This, of course, is the treatment accorded to someone who is still viewed by the law as innocent. By the time his trial is finished, Ahmad figures he'll have been in solitary confinement for 2 1/2 years.

What of the case? He is not allowed to disclose what was heard during the now-torpedoed preliminary hearing. But he says he remains frustrated by his inability to answer the government's case. The reason, he says, is that it has presented no case other than the testimony of the informants – which he insists has no credibility.

"When they first charged me, I never understood them (the charges). I still don't understand them. They seemed completely made up. They made no sense to me. But then when I hear how much the informers were being paid, I said `Hey, when you're being paid $4 million for something it doesn't take too much to make up some kind of story.' Right?

"(The Crown) says I'm part of some group. What group? Nobody answers. They say: `We'll tell you in court.' It's been a year and a half and still no one answers this question. ... I mean, what group is there? They say you planned all these things. I'm just waiting to see some kind of evidence."

And so he waits. Earlier this week, he staged a brief hunger strike to persuade jail authorities to grant the few privileges the court has allowed him (such as longer phone calls). That was one reason. The other was despair.

"No one cares," says Ahmad. "It's lock us up and throw away the key."