Montreal man with al-Qaida ties who threatened to bomb metro pleads guilty
Posted May 29, 2026 6:13 pm.
Last Updated May 29, 2026 6:17 pm.
The lawyer for an unhoused man who had previously attended Al-Qaeda training camps said his client had pleaded guilty in Montreal to threatening to carry out an attack on the city’s public transit system.
Leonard Waxman stated that Mohamed Abdullah Warsame had also admitted to calling a Passport Canada office from his place of detention and threatening to blow it up.
A joint statement of facts filed with the court reports that Warsame told a social worker at the Old Brewery homeless shelter in Montreal that he wanted to kill a million people by blowing up trains or subways with bombs.
This Canadian citizen of Somali origin had previously pleaded guilty in Minnesota in 2009 to providing material support to the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda.
According to the plea agreement reached in that case, he had traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to undergo training at Al-Qaeda camps, where he met the organization’s founder, Osama bin Laden.
Attorney Waxman stated that his client was homeless and suffered from mental health issues, noting that the Montreal police had initially referred him to mental health services before he was arrested by the RCMP in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in June 2025.
The case will be heard again by the court in September.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews which includes files from The Associated Press
