One of the twin brothers from Ottawa who pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges last week had hatched a plan sneak out of Canada and travel overland to join ISIS in Syria, court documents reveal.
He had also been in contact with another Canadian who featured prominently in Islamic State propaganda and once said he wanted to behead a female couple he saw kissing.
Ashton Larmond, 25, was handed a 17-year prison sentence Friday after entering a guilty plea to providing instructions to carry out an activity for the benefit of a terrorist group. He was, however, credited 894 days for time already served.
His brother Carlos, also 25, and a co-conspirator, 23-year-old Suliman Idris Mohamed, are each serving seven-year sentences after pleading guilty to a charge of conspiring to leave Canada to participate in the activities of a terrorist group.
READ MORE: Ottawa twin brothers, 1 other plead guilty to terror charges
Court documents obtained by Global News outline how Larmond came up with a plan to travel overland through a chain of other countries, after officials cancelled his passport in 2013 and thwarted his first attempt to travel to the ISIS front lines in the war-torn country.
He revealed the plan to a police informant, explaining how he wanted to cross the Canadian border into Alaska, travel by boat to Russia and onward to Afghanistan on his planned journey to the battlefields of Syria.
The documents also detail some of the extremist ideals he held, including a disturbing reaction to witnessing a same-sex kiss between two women.
Larmond told his then-spouse he wanted to “pull out the sword and behead them for the sake of Allah since Muslims are known for beheading,” the documents read.
READ MORE: ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani killed in Syria
He also, at one point, boasted to his spouse that he was “super right extreme,” also telling a friend he wasn’t afraid to share his extremist views on Facebook.
“I’m not a coward I don’t conceal the truth out of fear of some kafr (infidel) government,” the documents quote him as saying.
Prior to his initial attempt to travel to Syria in 2013, when his passport was invalidated just three days before he was due to fly to Turkey, a hub for ISIS’s legions of foreign fighters, he was in contact with John Maguire.
According to the Ottawa Citizen, the two were “said to have met at a lecture in 2012”; Maguire left for Syria that same year. The agreed statement of facts in Larmond’s case indicate he and Maguire had kept in touch over the Internet and he noted his intent to join Maguire in Syria.
Maguire, from Kemptville, Ont., notably appeared in a 2014 ISIS propaganda video that was released less than two months after two lone wolf attacks on Canadian soil: Martin Couture-Rouleau’s killing of Canadian Forces warrant officer Patrice Vincent near a recruitment centre in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que. on Oct. 20, and the Parliament Hill shooting in which Michael Zehaf-Bibeau gunned down reservist Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial on Oct. 22.
In the video, Maguire called on other to follow the lead of Couture-Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau.
READ MORE: How effective are government efforts to stop ISIS propaganda? (Feb. 2015)
in 2014 Ashton Larmond “convinced his brother to extremist Islam” after having converted himself sometime between 2009 and 2011.
Maguire, who identified as Abu Anwar al-Canadi in the video, was reportedly killed will fighting with ISIS in the northern Syrian city of Kobani in early 2015 at the age of 24.
Police nabbed the Larmond twins on January 9, 2015: Police arrested Ashton Carlos in the parking lot of a ski Hill in Quebec, while Carlos was stopped at Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport as he was attempting to fly from to Frankfurt, Germany.
Undercover police officers apprehended Mohamad three days later.
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