Sunday, June 04, 2006

Two Indians Among Terror Suspects

From the Telegraph Calcutta:

Several Canadians believed to be of Indian origin are among 17 people rounded up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Greater Toronto last night in the biggest anti-terrorism investigation in Canada since an Air-India aircraft was bombed by Khalistanis in 1985.

The list of those arrested, released in Toronto today by the authorities, names Steven Vikash Chand as among those detained during raid, which also led to the seizure of bomb-making material, computer hard drives and camouflage uniforms.

Chand, 25, a resident of Toronto, converted to Islam and has an alias, Abdul Shakur. Another detainee, Asad Ansari, 21, of Mississauga in the Greater Toronto area, is also believed to be of Indian origin.

There are some more Indian-sounding names on the list of 12 detainees released today, but it could not be verified immediately whether they originally came from elsewhere in the sub-continent.

The paper goes on to note that:

If it is finally determined that there are Indo-Canadians among those arrested last night, it will be a rare instance of people of Indian origin being involved in any international terrorism plot since September 11, 2001.

They sound a bit embarrassed.

Update, June 6th: The Hindustan Times is now claiming no connection between the various suspects as India itself, outside of a few "Indian sounding" names.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doing a bit of racial profiling ??

How Liberal of you.

bigcitylib said...

The causal link is the Indian newspaper said they were Indian, stupid.

Anonymous said...

the most important thing that we need to understand that they are all Muslims. It doesn't matter which country they are from.

Anonymous said...

There is no evidence of any nature to claim that they made be from India or Indian descent. The Indian newspaper has no privy to that kind of information. It is one thing for a cheap publication to doa stunt to make some additional dollars, it is another thing for a blogger in Canada to imitate it.

bigcitylib said...

It is an Indian newspaper presumbly stating certain facts. I consider it a bit of news that hasn't been reported elsewhere, and so posted it.