Charles C. Johnson contributed to this report.
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TORONTO, CANADA - APRIL 22: A VIA Rail train leaves Union Station, the heart of VIA Rail travel, bound for Windsor on April 22, 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report they have arrested two people connected to an alleged Al Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on a VIA Rail train in Canada. Credit: Getty Images
TORONTO (TheBlaze/AP) -- A suspect accused of plotting with al-Qaeda in Iran to derail a train in Canada said Tuesday authorities were basing their conclusions on mere appearances. Iran, meanwhile, denied any involvement.
Canadian investigators say Raed Jaser, 35, and his suspected accomplice Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, received "directions and guidance" from members of al-Qaeda in Iran. Iran said it had nothing to do with the plot, and claimed that groups such as al-Qaeda do not share Iran's ideology.
Charges against the two men include conspiring to carry out an attack and murder people in association with a terrorist group. Police - tipped off by an imam worried about one of the suspects' behavior - said it was the first known attack planned by al-Qaeda in Canada.
The men's case has raised questions about the extent of Shiite-led Iran's relationship with the predominantly Sunni Arab terrorist network. Relations between the two have been rocky for many years, but some al-Qaeda members were allowed to stay in Iran after fleeing Afghanistan following the U.S. led invasion there. Iran watched them carefully and limited their movements.
U.S. intelligence officials track limited al-Qaeda activity inside Iran. Remnants of al-Qaeda's so-called management council are still there, though they are usually kept under virtual house arrest by the Iranian regime. There are also a small number of financiers and facilitators who help move money, and sometimes weapons and people, throughout the region from their base in Iran.
Last fall, the Obama administration offered up to $12 million in rewards for information leading to the capture of two al-Qaeda leaders based in Iran. The U.S. State Department described them as key facilitators in sending extremists to Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Treasury Department also announced financial penalties against one of the men.
In this courtroom sketch, Chiheb Esseghaier appears in court in Montreal on Tuesday, April 23, 2013. Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35, were arrested and charged Monday in what the RCMP said was the first known al-Qaida terror plot in Canada. Credit: AP
TORONTO, CANADA - APRIL 22: A VIA Rail train leaves Union Station, the heart of VIA Rail travel, bound for Windsor on April 22, 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report they have arrested two people connected to an alleged Al Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on a VIA Rail train in Canada. Credit: Getty Images
Officials in Canada said Jaser and Esseghaier had "direction and guidance" from al-Qaeda members in Iran but no financial assistance, and there was no reason to think the planned attacks were state-sponsored.
Julie Martineau, a spokeswoman at the research institute, said Esseghaier began working at the center just outside Montreal in 2010 and was pursuing a Ph.D. in nanotechnology.
A LinkedIn page showing a man with Esseghaier's name and academic background said he helped author a number of biology research papers, including on HIV and cancer detection. The page says he was a student in Tunisia before moving to Canada in the summer of 2008.
The page carries a photo of a black flag inscribed with the Muslim declaration of faith: "There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet." The same flag was used by al-Qaeda in Iraq and then started being used by ultraconservative Islamic groups in Egypt, Tunisia, Mali and elsewhere across the region.
A photograph, obtained from a now defunct website, misspells Essenghaier’s last name but appears to be of him, and shows him to be a part of a “biosensor, biomems, biotechnology lab.”
French CBC confirmed that the Tunisian-born Essenghaier, is a Ph.D. student at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS). He studied at the Université de Sherbrooke in 2008-2009, is thirty years old, and is not a Canadian citizen.
His former group leader and research director, Mohammed Zourob could not be reached for comment because he had left his post in 2012, according to a Quebec new site.
Zourab’s program at received part of a $36 million grant from the Canadian government to pursue his research, raising the possibility that the Canadian taxpayer was subsidizing Essenghaier, the would-be jihadi.
Zourob’s research included “development of low-cost, rapid and highly sensitive DNA-based biosensor for routine monitoring of emerging organic compounds in water”; “development of bar-code, highly sensitive, label-free high throughput screening platform for endocrine disrupting compounds”; and “Integrated Lab-on-A-Chip with wireless communication capability for on-site mosquito-born pathogen detection.”
You can watch Zourob explain that work here on YouTube.
"While it's still early in the investigation and there is much we don't yet know, revelations of the suspect's expertise in bionanotechnology and infectious disease transmission is alarming and frightening,” explains David Reaboi, Vice President of the Center for Security Policy.
“[Essenghaier’s expertise] tells us a few things: it reinforces the clear pattern of jihadi terrorists being well-educated, with an emphasis on the hard sciences and engineering and it destroys the myth of economic motivating factors.”
In Markham, Ontario, north of Toronto, police tape cordoned off half of a duplex, with officers remaining at the scene well into Monday night. Sanjay Chaudhary, who lives in the other half of the duplex with his family, said the RCMP questioned him about his neighbor Jaser, asking whether he knew him or spoke to him often.
Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters on Tuesday that groups such as al-Qaeda have "no compatibility with Iran in both political and ideological fields."
Mehmanparast called the Canadian claims part of hostile policies against Tehran, and accused Canada of indirectly aiding al-Qaeda by joining Western support for Syrian rebels. Some Islamic militant factions, claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda, have joined forces seeking to topple the regime of Bashar Assad, one of Iran's main allies in the region.
The two countries have no diplomatic relations after Canada unilaterally closed its embassy in Tehran in 2012 and expelled Iranian diplomats from Ottawa.
Police said the men are not Canadian citizens and had been in Canada a "significant amount of time," but declined to say where they were from or why they were in the country.
Norris, Jaser's lawyer, said his client would "defend himself vigorously" against the accusations, and noted his client was a permanent resident of Canada who has lived there for 20 years. He refused to say where Jaser was from, saying that revealing his nationality in the current climate amounted to demonizing him.
The investigation surrounding the planned attack was part of a cross-border operation involving Canadian law enforcement agencies, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Canadian police said the men never got close to carrying out the attack.
RCMP chief superintendent Jennifer Strachan said Monday that Jaser and Esseghaier were targeting a route, but did not say whether it was a cross border route.
In New York, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne declined to discuss reports that the plot targeted a passenger line between New York City and Canada. However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that Canada has kept New York posted on the investigation.
"I can just tell you that you are probably safer in New York City than you are in any other big city," Bloomberg told reporters Tuesday without discussing details.
Police in Canada said Jaser and Esseghaier had been under investigation since last fall.
Muhammad Robert Heft, who runs an outreach organization for Islamic converts, and Hussein Hamdani, a lawyer and longtime advocate in the Muslim community, said one of the suspects is Tunisian and the other is from the United Arab Emirates. Heft and Hamdani were part of a group of Muslim community leaders who were briefed by the RCMP ahead of Monday's announcement.
In Abu Dhabi, a UAE source informed about the attack plot said there was "no UAE citizen" with the name Raed Jaser. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief media.
Authorities were tipped off by members of the Muslim community, Best said
Toronto lawyer Naseer Syed said a Toronto imam tipped off police. Syed would not say what, exactly him off. He said he was speaking for the imam, who wished to remain anonymous.
"I was involved in alerting police about the suspect. I made some calls on behalf of the imam over a year ago," he said from his Toronto office. "The Muslim community has been cooperating with authorities for a number of years and people do the right thing when there is reason to alert authorities."
A spokeswoman for the University of Sherbrooke near Montreal said Esseghaier studied there in 2008-2009. More recently, he has been doing doctoral research at the National Institute of Scientific Research, a spokeswoman at the training university confirmed.
