Montreal man who allegedly threatened to bomb public transit facing new terrorism charge

A Montreal man, who was previously convicted of supporting al-Qaida, is facing two new charges at the provincial level.

The 51-year-old Mohammed Abdullah Warsame is being charged with uttering threats and another for terrorism for allegedly threating to burn, destroy or damage Passport Canada offices in Montreal and Quebec City.

He is alleged to have made four threatening phone calls on Nov. 20 while being detained at the Rivière-des-Prairies detention centre.

“I guess it took them a while to trace the telephone number and where it was coming from,” said the man’s lawyer, Leonard Waxman.

Warsame was already facing terrorism charges for allegedly telling a homeless shelter worker — at Montreal’s Old Brewery Mission — that he understood how to make explosives, wanted to make bombs and then use them on public transit to kill a large number of people.

Legal aid lawyer Vincent Petit, who was representing Warsame, had said earlier this year that there was a realistic probability his client would plead guilty on Oct. 1 in front of the Court of Quebec. However, the court appearance was postponed to Jan. 8.

Warsame underwent a psychiatric evaluation at the Philippe-Pinel Psychiatric Institute to determine if he was suffering from a mental disorder at the time of this alleged crime, but this report has yet to be made public.

“The new team that was working with him discovered that he’s suffering from schizophrenia,” Waxman said. “So it adds a new dimension to the situation.

“I want to see if I can do something psychiatrically for him.”

“Everything is on the table,” added federal Crown prosecutor Samuel Monfette-Tessier. “We are negotiating with defence counsel right now, and we will pursue those negotiations.”

In 2009, Warsame pleaded guilty in Minnesota to providing material support to the terrorist organization al-Qaida. He was deported to Canada in 2010 and had no fixed address at the time of the alleged incident. 

According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Warsame, a Somali-born Canadian, attended lectures by Osama Bin Laden and spent 92 months in an American federal prison after his 2009 guilty plea.

Warsame’s lawyer says his client has no affiliation with any terrorist organization.

“Zero. This guy, he couldn’t hurt a fly,” Waxman said.

Mathieu Colin, the scientific director of the UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Extremism, says Warsame’s case is part of a larger trend.

“These kinds of cases, such as we are seeing right now in Montreal, is again a good illustration of what is happening for the past two or three years,” said Colin, who is also an associate professor at the School of applied politics at the Université de Sherbrooke. “That is to say a lot of individuals causing attacks or wanting to cause attacks on their own, just inspired by propaganda, inspired by terrorist material, but not acting as part of an organization or as part of the network.”

Warsame is due back in court March 9, where discussions will continue on both terrorism-related charges. So far, it’s unclear if either case will go to trial.