TheStar.com | Canada | Emails criticize ‘West’s dominance’
Terror suspect Khawaja wrote that it was unacceptable to do nothing, trial hears
Jul 15, 2008 04:30 AM
Richard Brennan
Ottawa BureauOTTAWA–Momin Khawaja said in a 2003 email that he couldn’t stand by and watch “blood-thirsty” imperialists attack Afghanistan and other Muslim countries while he held down a cushy 9-to-5 job.
“There is no excuse deep down, just reaping the benefits of life in the West,” wrote Khawaja, who was arrested four years ago and is now on trial in Ontario Superior Court on seven terrorism-related charges, including allegedly funding known terrorists and building a device to be used to explode a 600-kilogram fertilizer bomb in a failed attack on London.
“I was not content with the idea of a 9-to-5 life where you just put on a smiley face and pretend you can’t do anything, change anything, while the muslim (sic) world is in flames,” the now 29-year-old computer programmer said in an Aug. 8, 2003, email to his former Pakistani fiancée.
Almost 200 pages of emails, most of them related to the courtship between Khawaja and Zeba Khan, 23, were released to the public yesterday. Khawaja worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs as a software developer.
Khawaja wrote that to do nothing was to “watch the West’s dominance, blood-thirsty imperialism, and the Ummah’s (Muslim world’s) oppression. It’s just like Bush said … you are either on their side or our side.”
As the email contact with Khan grew in regularity, so did rhetoric about his hatred for the West, and in particular the United States.
Khan was also highly critical of the West’s way of life.
The Crown has presented evidence to show that Khawaja went to an Al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan near the Afghan border in 2003, visited London to meet with known terrorists and acted as a courier for Al Qaeda, and that he was constructing an electronic device – dubbed the Hi-Fi Digimonster – to be used to set off a detonator, when his parents’ Orleans home was raided by RCMP on March 29, 2004.
Earlier, Justice Douglas Rutherford said he found much of the evidence presented so far at Khawaja’s trial to be “sinister and chilling.”
Rutherford came to that conclusion in deciding to allow emails, DVDs and CDs to be entered as evidence despite objections from defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon that they were prejudicial.
Rutherford, who is hearing the case without a jury, said the DVDs and emails could be no more harmful than the explicit details revealed over the past three weeks.
“We are dealing with, and have been hearing about such sinister and chilling activity since the trial began, that the violence and vitriol revealed in the disputed evidence is simply not likely to have much added impact,” he said in court.
Greenspon tried to block an Oct. 24, 2003, email from Khawaja to Khan in which he said that killing thousands of “innocent humans” in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States was the cost of economic jihad or the Islamic struggle against the West.
“My argument was that they are not relevant to anything to do with the London fertilizer bomb plot,” Greenspon told reporters later.
In the Oct. 24 email, Khawaja stated: “Yes, I understand that innocent human beings died, but there is absolutely no other way of achieving the same objective with the same effect.”
Lead Crown lawyer David McKercher said the DVDs, which have not been shown in court, show violent acts of terrorism.
The trial heard last week that Khawaja arranged for thousands of dollars to be supplied to Omar Khyam, leader of a failed Al Qaeda London bomb plot and one of five co-conspirators sentenced to life in prison.
Khawaja also said in the October email the terrorist attack on the United States was a “proper and honourable way” of conducting economic jihad.
“Because of Sept. 11, the Airline industry is dead, travel and tourism is dead, the U.S. dollar is dead, (and) the U.S. economy is practically in a state of recession. Trillions of dollars in lost revenue, thousands of businesses bankrupt, and the negative impact continues till this day.”
Khan is expected to testify through a video link from Dubai tomorrow.
Khawaja broke off the engagement on Christmas Day 2003