CANADIAN authorities have thwarted what they believe to be a major terrorist threat with the arrests of 17 people "inspired by al-Qaeda" who had stockpiled huge amounts of explosives.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the suspects, 12 men and five juveniles, were all Canadian residents, mostly from the Toronto area, and were rounded up in raids over the weekend.(...) Authorities bore down on the suspects after the group secured three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a fertiliser that can be used to make explosives. "It was their intent to use it for a terrorist attack," Mike McDonell, assistant commissioner of the mounted police, said yesterday in Toronto. "To put it in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people was completed with only one tonne of ammonium nitrate." He said the group "posed a real and serious threat". "It had the capacity and intent to carry out these attacks."
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