The Cell Next Door

June of last year was a wake up call for Canada. 17 homegrown terrorists were arrested after purchasing 3 tons ammonium nitrate for the purpose of constructing a truck bomb. The CSIS was able to infiltrate the cell because Mubin Shaikh worked as an operative.

Shaikh says he was pulled aside and given the jihadi pitch, the list of reasons for acts of violence: events happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, the raping of Muslim women, the killing of Muslim children, and other emotionally charged issues. He reported the incident back to the CSIS and told them that he thought Fahim was "a time bomb waiting to go off."

Shaikh had infiltrated the cell so deeply, that he was training the muhajideen for terrorism using his Canadian military background, all the while under the watchful eye of the CSIS. But Shaikh isn't what many would call a moderate Muslim, He favors sharia law, his wife is shown in the video wearing the traditional burqua with only the eyes showing. He explains why he informed the authorities;

"I was in the Army Cadets. I still remember things like February 15, the day the official Canadian flag was proclaimed. This is home for me. I can't have things blowing up in my backyard. There are values that I live by -- it's not that they're Islamic or they're Western; it's that they're human. That's what it comes down to."

Here's a synopsis of the video, if you miss it on TV the Frontline website has an online video.

"Canadians call it `Toronto the good,'" says FRONTLINE/World and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter Linden MacIntyre, as he begins his report from North America's fifth-largest city. Toronto is known for its many multicultural communities. But the famously safe city was rocked last summer by news of a homegrown terrorist plot.

The courts have only now begun to hear their cases. Whatever the verdicts reveal, McIntyre reports, Canadian authorities believe they have disrupted the kind of homegrown terror cell that has already caused havoc in Europe.

We first see Mubin Shaikh walking along the Toronto streets. This is the man who infiltrated the suspected terror cell. He will be a key witness at the trials of some of the accused. Shaikh is a devout Muslim who shares much of the passion and piety of the young men now awaiting trial. But he was appalled by what he thought they planned to do.

"Storming Parliament, kidnapping, holding hostage the MPs, beheading them one by one unless Canadian troops are pulled out of Afghanistan and Muslim prisoners are released from prisons in Canada," Shaikh tells McIntyre incredulously.

Shaikh, who is the father of four, volunteered to work with the authorities to help thwart a plot he saw as dangerous to his family, his Muslim community and his country.

"At the end of the day," he shrugs, "I can't have things blowing up in my backyard."

McIntyre travels to the city of Mississauga, just west of Toronto. One of the conspirators was arrested here last June. Three of the accused attended Mississauga high school. Fellow students remember that the group practiced an austere version of Islam called Salafism. Their intensity set them apart even from most of their fellow Muslims.

Pictures in a school yearbook show a studious young man called Fahim Ahmad and the fun-loving Zakaria Amara -- both believed to have been the leaders of the suspect cell.

Canadian intelligence had been monitoring Fahim Ahmad for four years, after he began chatting on the Internet with people already marked as potential security risks. Fahim Ahmad was attracting a growing circle of "followers," and by 2005 the CSIS asked Shaikh to get close to the group.

Shaikh was a former cadet with martial arts training. He had also burned out on hard living in his youth and had become "born again" to the faith he grew up with. "I took it upon myself again in an observant manner," he tells McIntyre.

In 2005, he was radical enough to openly campaign for Sharia law. But he was leading a strange double life, simultaneously working as an undercover agent.

There were others in the community who smelled trouble in Fahim Ahmad's group. A Toronto restaurant owner and Muslim convert tells the reporter how he berated one young man after Friday prayers for handing out jihadi videos glorifying the 9/11 hijackers.

Many young men, McIntyre suggests, are becoming indoctrinated through the Internet, which is taking the place of religious scholarship. Shaikh agrees. He tells the reporter that it's common to invite friends over to eat barbequed chicken and watch jihadi videos.

Traveling to Washington, D.C., to get a broader sense of the threat posed by this homegrown jihad, the reporter talks to Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA bin Laden desk. Scheuer tells him that bin Laden has long been passing down instructions to the next generation on the fight and what the struggle is all about -- Western support for the oppressors, Western invaders defiling Muslim lands. These grievances, Scheuer says, are spread through the last will and testaments of 22-year-old suicide bombers, whose videos are watched over and over on the Internet.

"I'm afraid the American people, at least, don't have a good idea of just how dangerous the threat is that we face," Scheuer says.

This buildup of grievances exploded like a powder keg in Madrid in March 2004. It was people carrying local passports, McIntyre says, who ignited the attacks in Spain. Next followed the Netherlands and the murder of controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was slain in broad daylight along a bike path in Amsterdam. He had confronted Islamists over their attitudes toward the West and, in particular, toward women. His murderer was Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch citizen and part of the Hoffstad Network. This group, like the one in Toronto, had talked of blowing up secret service offices and assassinating politicians.

McIntyre meets with Ruud Peters, a leading Dutch Islamic scholar, who was an expert witness at Bouyeri's trial. From his offices overlooking Amsterdam's tranquil canals, he explains the larger issues influencing the minds of these young men. "One is the rejection of Dutch society, as they feel it, so they want to go back to Islam and they want to have their own Islam, a kind of universal, pure Islam." The other factor, Peters says, is a need to distance themselves from their parents, for whom they have affection but whom they also view as society's losers.

The trajectory, then, suggests McIntyre, is that these homegrown jihadis start with general alienation, seek out a radical voice, and then go to the Internet to find each other. "That's right," says Peters.

McIntyre next meets the parents of Jason Walters, a young Dutch American who was also attracted to the Hoffstad group. Walters' parents watched TV in horror as their son tried to throw a hand grenade at police during his arrest. Both struggle to describe what happened to their quiet young boy, who, they later discovered, had attended training camps in Pakistan. Jason Walters is now serving a 15-year prison sentence.

The list of impressionable young men drawn to extremism goes on. McIntyre arrives in Atlanta, Georgia, at the home of a respected college professor whose son is also now in jail. Haris Ahmed is awaiting trial for conspiring to aid the Toronto terror cell.

His father, Syed Ahmed, rues the day he did not pay closer attention to his son's activities. "I thought he was just sending emails, or he was just reading some newspapers. So I think that was my mistake."

In March 2005, Haris Ahmed traveled to Toronto with a friend, unaware that they were under surveillance by the FBI and Canadian intelligence. Haris met with Fahim Ahmad, the suspected leader of the Toronto group. According to U.S. court documents, they discussed possible attacks on civilian and military targets. However, the indictment notes that there was no "imminent danger" to the American public.

Shaikh confirms that the Toronto group was planning to set up a safe house for those involved in the plot. There was also talk of Chechnya-style resistance in northern Ontario, where the group could fortify themselves in case anyone came looking for them. He also tells McIntyre that he met with Zacaria Amara, who showed up at one meeting with a detonator.

"He said he could build a bomb right now, but he was still experimenting to make sure it didn't blow up in his face," Shaikh recalls.

Shaikh takes the reporter three hours outside of Toronto, to where he trained the young men in combat activities. The landscape looks benign enough now, blanketed with snow and pine trees. But 12 or so aspiring warriors spent a Christmas break there firing off live ammunition and praying five times a day to Allah.

It was from another informant that Canadian police learned of the group's attempt to purchase 3 tons of ammonium nitrate, a potential explosive material.

That's when the police moved in. Shaikh, who admits he was also angry at the world and wanting to lash out, realizes that one of those young men now in custody could so easily have been him. "I was lucky," he says, "that I was exposed to people who I could talk to who could correct my understanding."

Canada was lucky as well. Shaikh is a hero to his homeland, and his nation will no doubt need more of them in the future.