Man dreamt of being a 'silent assassin,' court hears

Mohamed Hersi, seen outside a Brampton, Ont., court in 2011,

said people who insult the Prophet Muhammad 'deserve ...

what's coming to them' in taped conversations played in court

on Tuesday. Hersi is in court facing terrorism-related charges.

Photograph by: Peter J. Thompson,

BY STEWART BELL

Mohamed Hersi was talking to an undercover police officer about the al-Qaida propaganda magazine Inspire when he hesitated, wondering whether he should go on, but the officer reassured him it was OK.

"Who am I going to tell?" the officer said.

The conversation, played for jurors on Tuesday at Hersi's trial on terrorismrelated charges, was one of the last the pair would have. Ten days later, Hersi was arrested at Toronto's Pearson airport as he attempted to leave Canada.

Since last week, the undercover officer who befriended him has been testifying that the 28-year-old Toronto security guard had intended to travel to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab, as one of his friends had already done.

The case marks the first time police have arrested a Canadian to prevent him from going abroad to allegedly join a terrorist group, and it has come to trial amid concerns about dozens of radicalized Canadian youths joining armed extremist factions in Syria. Al-Shabab is an affiliate of al-Qaida that has been fighting to impose its brutal version of Islamic law on Somalis. It claimed responsibility for last year's massacre at Nairobi's Westgate shopping mall, which left two Canadians dead.

In the dozens of recorded conversations played for jurors over the past week, Hersi was mostly cautious, speaking vaguely about "that place" and "that guy" rather than using specific names, but he occasionally let down his guard.

During his meetings with the undercover officer, who was pretending he also wanted to join al-Shabab, he began to discuss the writings of jihadist ideologues such as Anwar Awlaki and Omar Hammami, an American who lived in Toronto before joining al-Shabab and leading one of its factions.

Hersi appeared to see himself playing a similar role as Hammami.

"Me personally, trust me, I think I'd be better suited to a leadership position, but you never know what's going to happen," he said in one of the taped conversations.

He also discussed his desire to get in shape before leaving, mentioning an imprisoned Saudi "sheik" who had written about the need to be able to run 10 kilometres. He talked about Shooter, a film starring Mark Wahlberg as a former U.S. Marine sniper.

"I always picture as a type of, you know, like a silent assassin. You know what I mean?" he said in a taped conversation played Tuesday. "I don't know what I'm trying to say here. You gotta be quiet about everything, you know. But some of those people deserve to, you know, get what they, what's coming to them, you know. If you ever insult the prophet Allah, peace be upon him, you deserve a certain outcome, you know."

He then referred to a U.S. woman who had launched Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, a response to a threat to kill the creators of the animated television comedy South Park over an episode that depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear costume.

"You can't insult Him, ever," Hersi said, adding that insulting Muhammad was worse than insulting his mother because it was like insulting Islam itself. "Woman, man, child - doesn't matter. Take them down, right?" The excerpt was one of several that hinted at Hersi's alleged drift toward extremism in the months before he was arrested on March 29, 2011. It remains unclear how the Somali-Canadian, who was raised in Toronto, came to adopt such views.

Source: leaderpost.com