The father of a Montreal girl targeted in one of several police terror raids conducted Tuesday said his daughter was an “innocent victim” whose mind has been poisoned by radical religious teachings over the last three years.
The man told the Star that the fate of 19-year-old Maha Zibara — arrested May 15 at the Montreal airport while allegedly bound for the ranks of a Syrian terror group such as the Islamic State — is the responsibility of Muslim preacher Adil Charkaoui, a former terror suspect, or those in his entourage at the Assahaba Islamic Community Centre.
“They are responsible,” said Maha’s father, Jad Zibara. “They are manipulating young people who are 16, 17, 18, 19. They are putting dark ideas in their head.”
“I don’t know if he is at that point of sending people to Syria or in Iraq, but what I know is that the teachings he gives are extremist and radical.”
Reached by telephone Tuesday evening, Charkaoui said he did not know and had never met Zibara.
“At the community centre there is a separation between the men and the women. I don’t see the women. I don’t meet them,” he said.
Charkaoui was detained and later subjected to restrictive conditions under a federal security certificate that was sought in 2003 because of never-proved suspicions that Charkaoui was an Al Qaeda sleeper agent. The case against him was dropped when Ottawa was unwilling to reveal the sources of its allegations against him.
He has never been charged with a crime, is now a Canadian citizen, and is suing the federal government over his ordeal.
The RCMP conducted Montreal-area raids Tuesday that are believed to be linked to a radicalization investigation.
Uniformed Mounties were spotted by TV cameras removing boxes and computer equipment in St-Léonard, in east-end Montreal, where Maha Zibara lives.
Charkaoui is a lightning rod in Quebec, orchestrating protests against what he says is rampant Islamophobia while facing a barrage of accusations that he has played a role in radicalizing some of the 21 young Quebecers who have either fled Canada or been arrested by the RCMP since the start of the year.
“There is a lot of ignorance and malice. When we have both of them together it becomes toxic,” Charkaoui said. “It’s as if everything that happens related to radicalization in this country is because of a single person.”
There are, in fact, other similarities between the most recent group and the other clusters of terror cases that have arisen since a group of seven young men and women first fled in January for Turkey, crystallizing fears of radicalization in Montreal’s Muslim community.
Like five of the first bunch and like a young couple who were formally charged in April with terrorism offences, including possession of explosive materials, Maha Zibara was a student at Collège de Maisonneuve, a junior college in Quebec’s CÉGEP system.
It was approaching the end of the school year when she announced that she would be leaving her family home in St-Léonard for an Italian wedding getaway.
Instead, at around midnight on May 15, the junior college student was among 10 young people rounded up by the RCMP. In a statement a few days later, the Mounties said they had taken away passports from all 10 because they believed their true intentions were to join the ranks of foreign terror groups.
“Maha said she was leaving for Italy to have a wedding,” her father said. “I don’t know if she knew the other young people but at a minimum she knew one young person named Aymane, a Moroccan. She wanted to get married to him.”
Zibara fantasized extensively on a Facebook page that she created earlier this year about getting married, posting a lengthy six-point explanation of the religious benefits of marriage as recently as Monday. She also posted other items that are the staple of any Western teenager’s social media account: pictures of food, jokes for friends and even an April 14 post critical of ISIS, the banned terror group also known as the Islamic State.
But Zibara’s father said he had intervened with his daughter several times, asking her to remove items from her social media feeds that featured a more strident religious tone.
They were messages he said that he personally did not agree with and that he said coincided with the girl’s regular attendance at the Assahaba mosque, which began nearly three years ago.
“I asked her many times to take them down because it didn’t represent the love of Islam, it didn’t represent the real Islam. Islam is a religion of mercy. It’s not a religion of violence,” he said.
Charkaoui said the criticism is misplaced, that all his sermons and religious courses are public and transparent.
“I was the victim of the security certificates,” he said. “Believe me. We take extra care. If there is the least bit of radical speech, we would deal with it, but there isn’t.”
But there are 10 families struggling to understand the allegations that have been made against their young sons and daughters as well as the likelihood they could be facing further legal consequences in the days to come.
“I can’t believe that Maha would leave for Turkey to go to Syria,” said Zibara. “I still can’t believe it.”