Arrests Shock Canadian Muslims

17 Suspects Allegedly Tried To Acquire 3 Tons Of Ammonium Nitrate

(CBS/AP)  Several members of a suspected terrorist ring prayed daily at a storefront mosque in a middle-class city west of Toronto but never spoke of hurting others, one of their prayer leaders said.

"I will say that they were steadfast, religious people. There's no doubt about it. But here we always preach peace and moderation," Qamrul Khanson, an imam at the one-room Al-Rahman Islamic Center for Islamic Education, said Sunday.

The 40-50 Muslim families who worship at the mosque were astonished, he said, to learn that police had arrested 12 adults, ages 19 to 43, and five suspects younger than 18 on Friday and Saturday, charging them with plotting an attack in southern Ontario. Two Americans who met with the suspects also are in custody.

The group acquired what was supposed to be three tons of ammonium nitrate from undercover Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in a sting operation, the Toronto Star has reported. The Star, however, citing unnamed sources, said they received a harmless substance. The fertilizer can be mixed with fuel oil or other ingredients to make a bomb.

That amount of ammonium nitrate is three times the amount used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said assistant Royal Canadian Mounted Police commissioner Mike McDonell. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people and injured more than 800.

Officials said the operation involved some 400 intelligence and law-enforcement officers and was the largest counterterrorism operation in Canada since the nation's Anti-Terrorism Act was adopted after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Toronto Star reported that the investigation began in 2004 with the monitoring of Internet chat rooms.

While there was no indication that the suspects were planning an attack in the United States, the arrests, however, are raising new concerns about security along the 4,000-mile long U.S.-Canada border.

Critics have long worried that Canada's liberal immigration policies and a porous border make for a dangerous mix, CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers reports.

Christopher Whitcomb, a former FBI agent and a CBS News terrorism analyst, says "The biggest problem is that with a 4,000-mile border we have so much territory it's virtually impossible for the Border Patrol to secure all of that. We've addressed all of the issues in Mexico, but I think we really haven't looked much along the same lines along the Canadian border."

Whitcomb says that while "it may have been relatively easy" for the suspects to cross the border into the U.S., "that doesn't mean they could have done any harm. The three tons of ammonium nitrate they're trying to get into the United States would not have come in."

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CBS's Face the Nation the operation was "obviously a great success for the Canadians. They're to be congratulated for it."

The 17 men arrested represent a spectrum of Canadian society, from the unemployed to a school bus driver to the college-educated. The 12 adults live in Toronto, Mississauga and Kingston, Ontario.