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VANCOUVER -- A British Columbia couple found guilty of terrorism charges have had their verdicts tossed out in a scathing court decision that flays the RCMP for its "egregious" conduct in manipulating naive suspects into carrying out a police-manufactured crime.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce said the Mounties used trickery, deceit and veiled threats to engineer the terrorist acts for which John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested on Canada Day three years ago.
The couple believed they were planting pressure-cooker bombs to kill and maim crowds gathered to celebrate at the B.C. legislature.
"The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more," Bruce said in a landmark ruling Friday as she characterized the RCMP's methods as "multi-faceted and systematic manipulation."
"There is clearly a need to curtail the actions of police ... to ensure that future undercover investigations do not follow the same path."
Bruce said Mounties involved in a months-long sting launched in early 2013 knowingly exploited Nuttall and Korody's vulnerabilities to induce them to commit an offence.
She described the pair as marginalized, socially isolated, former heroin addicts dependent on methadone and welfare to subsist and said they were "all talk and no action."
Nuttall and Korody were recent converts to Islam. Their trial heard Nuttall say in a recording that he wanted to kill and maim countless people during Canada Day festivities in retaliation for Canada's role in the mistreatment of Muslims in Afghanistan and other countries.
Without the heavy-handed involvement of undercover officers, it would have been impossible for Nuttall and Korody to articulate, craft and execute a terrorist bomb plot, Bruce said.
"Ultimately, their role in carrying out the plan was minuscule compared to what the police had to do," Bruce said. "It was the police who were the leaders of the plot."
Followup to this story: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/06/27/0355225
Yeah, sometimes the dragon wins. Lucky for us - sometimes the knight in shining armor is worse than the dragon! Lucky for Canadians, anyway.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 30 2016, @05:44PM
Look, even if somebody hands you terrorist equipment and says "you should be a terrorist", it's still not OK to be a terrorist. Every damn fool knows this.
Even if it were more like "be a terrorist or we'll poison your cat", everybody knows you're supposed to report the threat.
It's a very unusual case where you are under threat for long enough to perform terrorism, but unable to report that you are under threat. That's a movie plot line.
(Score: 2) by dingus on Saturday July 30 2016, @06:21PM
So their crime is that they were manipulated? Is that really a punishabvle offense?