OTTAWA — Canadian authorities have broken up what they considered to be a terrorist cell but let the al-Qaeda-trained ringleader go free and leave Canada voluntarily, a government spokeswoman said on Thursday.
The Toronto-area group consisted of four Algerian refugee claimants alleged to be members of the Islamist militant Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GPSC), which Canada has listed as a terrorist entity.
The central figure had studied bomb-making at two al Qaeda camps run by Osama bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan and had been an al Qaeda training camp instructor, said Barbara Campion, spokeswoman for the counter-terrorism agency Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Investigators confronted him and he left shortly afterward, in March 2004, she said, confirming details published in Thursday's National Post newspaper.
"It was deemed that a confrontation interview was the best way to go," Campion said.
The other three members were later arrested and deported to the United States, because they had entered from a U.S. border crossing. None of the four were named.
It was not immediately clear why the alleged bomb expert had not been arrested. But Canada 's laws—even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States—do not make it a crime to be a member of a terrorist group.
Canadian law is tied more to action than membership. The authorities would have to prove someone participated in an activity of a terrorist group.
However, it does criminalize entering or remaining in a country "for the benefit of, at the direction of or in association with a terrorist group."
Canadian law requires stronger evidence to convict a person of a crime, so it is conceivable that the authorities were unwilling to risk a defeat at trial and opted instead to get them out of Canada .
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