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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: 4, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Saturday July 30 2016, @09:35PM
Not mentioned in the summary, but the cops rearrested them within a couple of hours, and are trying to apply for - I am not making this up - a special terrorism peace bond. [www.cbc.ca]
To truly understand this couple, you need to know that their original plan, the thing that established them as credible terrorist masterminds, was to steal a Trident submarine from Seattle.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @12:43AM
Silly Canadians, the 9 Trident subs that can each hold 24 missiles that can each hold 10 warheads are on the /other/ side of Puget Sound. Although I'm sure someone would have told them that, once they got to Seattle.
Anyone else notice that more and more Canadians [seattletimes.com] are trying to get into America? They know how great it's gonna be and they can't wait.