Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a Pakistani-Canadian, has been convicted of terrorist crimes by a Canadian court and is likely to receive a stiff sentence on 18 November.| Khawaja has been convicted of seven offences, including that he was a bomb-builder; that he had trained as a terrorist; and that he had financed terrorism through an intermediary. |
Sentencing on the individual counts ranges from 10 years to life. Justice Douglas Rutherford of Ontario Superior Court found that Khawaja, whose day job was to fix computers for Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, felt it was his calling to do whatever he could to help a band of British Al Qaeda sympathisers whom he had met on the Internet. Last year, five of these men were convicted of plotting to bomb packed nightclubs and busy shopping malls around London, in hopes of creating a panic that would force the British government to pull its soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Globe and Mail reports.
Tarek Fatah, co-founder of the progressive Muslim Canadian Congress, said in a statement that Khawaja's conviction comes "after this terrorist had been portrayed by Islamist groups in Canada as a victim of so-called Islamophobia and racial profiling". The conviction should serve as a wake-up call to self-styled leaders of the Muslim community who painted the picture of Momin Khawaja as a victim and the Crown as the enemy. May be Islamists in Canada and the West will now come to their senses and cease spreading a sense of false victimhood among young Muslim men.