OTTAWA - The ringleader of the infamous July 2005 London transit bombings that killed 52 Britons attended the same terrorist training camp as Momin Khawaja, the Ottawa software designer's trial has been told.
Mohammed Siddiqui Khan was identified in testimony last week as one of several British Muslims who spent time at the camp in the remote Malakand region of northern Pakistan in the summer of 2003.
Khan's name couldn't be reported initially because of a publication ban imposed by Justice Douglas Rutherford of Ontario Superior Court. The judge has since lifted the ban in response to arguments by media outlets.
Mohammed Babar, the Crown's star witness at the Khawaja trial, has testified that Khan -- whom he knew at the time only by the code name Ibrahim -- visited the Malakand camp with a group of other men seeking training in the use of explosives.
Crown attorney David McKercher also mentioned Khan in his opening address at the trial, noting that he had been spotted by investigators in Britain in the company of Islamic extremists who also had regular contact with Khawaja.
There has been no evidence to date to show that Khawaja and Khan had any direct dealings with each other. Rather, the Crown has pointed to their common associates as part of a broader effort to portray Khawaja as a committed jihadi.
Babar testified that the people who accompanied Khan to the Malakand camp included Omar Kkyam and Jawad Akbar, two of the five men convicted by a British court last year for participating in a failed plot to bomb a London nightclub, a shopping centre southeast of the city, and parts of the U.K. electrical and gas grids.
The case came to be known as the Crevice prosecution, a reference to the police code name of Operation Crevice that uncovered the plot. Khawaja faces seven Canadian charges arising from the conspiracy, including a key allegation that he built a remote-controlled detonator to set off home-made, fertilizer-based bombs.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is being tried by Rutherford without a jury. The trial, currently in recess, is to resume Wednesday.
Babar, a former al-Qaida operative turned police informer, has testified that Khawaja visited the Malakand camp in July 2003 and, although he spent only three or four days there, learned to fire an AK-47 assault rifle, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and a light machine-gun.
"He was excited and he enjoyed it," said Babar.
He added, however, that Khawaja had left to return to Canada by the time the group that included Khan, Khyam and Akbar made another trip to the camp for a different kind of training.
"We were going to physically test (an) explosive device that we were going to make," said Babar.
The device was a small one, using ammonium nitrate fertilizer as its basic ingredient and a crude, hand-lit fuse. The first test was a dud but the second was a success, said Babar.
McKercher had previously told the court that British investigators planted an electronic bug that caught Khan in conversation with Khyam in England in February 2004. Khawaja was visiting separately with Khyam and others at roughly the same time, but there has been no indication that the Ottawa man came face-to-face with Khan.
The ties between Khan and the other conspirators were first disclosed last year, when British security and police operatives admitted they had dismissed Khan and another man, Shehzad Tanweer, as fringe players in the Crevice investigation.
They abandoned surveillance of them and didn't round them up with the others in March 2004. Sixteen months later, Khan, Tanweer and two other men staged the suicide attacks that wrought havoc on three subway trains and a double-decker bus.
The ban on reporting Khan's name in connection with the Khawaja trial was imposed at the request of British prosecutors, ostensibly to avoid prejudicing the jury in yet another trial currently unfolding in London. Three men face charges there of acting as scouts to help choose targets for the 2005 suicide bombers.
Lawyers for the Ottawa Citizen and the CBC challenged the ban, arguing that it was unfair to withhold information from the Canadian public on the basis that jurors in another country needed to be protected.
