VANCOUVER – A person with alleged ties to Canada’s spy agency may have helped radicalize a man who was eventually arrested for plotting to blow up the British Columbia legislature, a court has heard.
The information comes after B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce ordered the release of a heavily edited transcript from a closed-door hearing that took place last week in connection with the trial of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody.
The pair was found guilty last June on terrorism charges but the convictions haven’t been entered while defence lawyers argue police entrapped the couple through an elaborate undercover police sting.
Their lawyers are applying for correspondence between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and an alleged human source in order to better understand the role the spy agency played in the investigation.
“If there (redacted) was a human source then that raises serious issues about the potential role of CSIS in inciting the applicants to commit terrorist acts,” said Nuttall’s lawyer Marilyn Sandford in the transcript.
If the possible source is acting as an agent for either the RCMP or CSIS while at the same time encouraging Nuttall and Korody to commit terrorist acts “then we say that’s potentially an abuse of process or potentially entrapment,” she added.
Sandford told the court that her client claimed the alleged CSIS operative “strongly encouraged him on many occasions to engage in violent terrorist acts and played a significant role in (his) radicalization.”
Lawyers for the Crown and CSIS opposed the release, arguing that the only evidence in favour of the disclosure came from Nuttall himself.
“He’s anything but a reliable historian,” Peter Eccles said.
Everything presented during the couple’s trial indicates Nuttall didn’t think he had been radicalized by anyone other than himself, Eccles said.
The lawyer said the defence’s theory that the alleged operative radicalized Nuttall doesn’t follow what the court heard at trial, when Nuttall instructed undercover officers to “go do jihad.”
The judge ultimately ruled against CSIS and ordered the correspondence be handed over to defence, concluding that there was enough evidence of a possible connection between the spy agency and its alleged source to warrant the disclosure.
The transcript of the closed-door proceeding was released after several media outlets, including The Canadian Press, went to court opposing the order that the hearing be held in camera.
CSIS and the Crown lawyers wanted the hearing to remain secret because of the risk that sensitive information could identify a possible CSIS source.
They argued that an in-camera hearing was essential because anyone present for long enough in the courtroom’s public gallery could readily identify the individual in question.
But the judge disagreed, saying that editing out potentially identifying material was enough to deal with CSIS’s concerns.
Amid lengthy sections of blacked-out text in the released transcript, Sandford denied that the information defence applied for from CSIS was a “fishing expedition.”
She described how the alleged source, person X, met Nuttall “out of the blue.”
“The curious history of (redacted) X, and it is curious. Why is (redacted) X having these communications with Mr. Nuttall?”
The next 12 lines are blacked out.
“So if, indeed, (redacted) X was a CSIS human source, and it’s only if (redacted) was providing information to CSIS that a disclosure order will yield anything here, then, in our submission, that is clearly relevant to the issues that are alive in these proceedings.” she told the court.
She reminded the judge that Nuttall approached CSIS over his concerns about some people he met at the mosque. “We have no disclosure related to that.”
“So (Nuttall) is the one who initiates contact with CSIS, and then this mysterious person shows up ….”
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