(Reuters) – Canadian police have arrested two men and charged them with plotting to derail a Toronto-area passenger train in an operation that they say was backed by al Qaeda elements in Iran.
“Had this plot been carried out, it would have resulted in innocent people being killed or seriously injured,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police official James Malizia told reporters on Monday.
The RCMP said it had arrested Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, of Montreal, and Raed Jaser, 35, of Toronto in connection with the plot. Authorities said it was not linked to last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 200.
Neither suspect is a Canadian citizen, and police did not reveal their nationalities. Two sources following the investigation said one was Tunisian.
Canada’s intelligence agency has long expressed concern about the possibility that disgruntled and radicalized Canadians could attack targets at home and abroad.
Police gave little detail about the alleged plotters, but said a tip from the Muslim community had helped their year-long investigation.
Esseghaier has been a doctoral student at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique near Montreal since 2010 and was about midway through his degree, the school said.
“He is doing a PhD in the field of energy and materials sciences,” Julie Martineau, the school’s director of communications, told Reuters.
A bail hearing for the two men was due to take place in Toronto on Tuesday morning.
“AL QAEDA ELEMENTS”
Malizia said they had received “support from al Qaeda elements located in Iran” but there was no indication that the plot, which police described as the first known al Qaeda-backed plot on Canadian soil, was sponsored by the Iranian state.
Al Qaeda is strongly Sunni Muslim-oriented. Shi’ite Iran did host some senior al Qaeda figures under a form of house arrest in the years following the September 11 attacks, but there has been little to no evidence to date of joint attempts to stage attacks against the West.
However, a U.S. government source said Iran was home to a little-known network of al Qaeda fixers and “facilitators” based in the Iranian city of Zahedan, very close to Iran’s borders with both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The source said they serve as go-betweens, travel agents and financial intermediaries for al Qaeda operatives and cells operating in Pakistan and moving through the area.
They do not operate under the protection of the Iranian government, which periodically launches crackdowns on al Qaeda elements, though at other times it appears to turn a blind eye to them.
It is also an area where Iranian authorities have battled a Sunni insurgency of their own in recent years. The Sunni group Jundollah is alleged to have carried out several attacks including a bombing that killed 42 people in 2009, and attacks on mosques in Zahedan.
TRAIN ROUTE TARGETED
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