Canada will accept 25,000 Syrian refugees; shared border with New York a concern
Canada will accept 25,000 Syrian refugees; shared border with New York a concern
POSTED 7:48 PM, NOVEMBER 16, 2015, BY MARY MURPHY
NEW YORK— When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested two men in April 2013, accusing them of plotting to blow up a Toronto to New York Amtrak train, the story didn’t receive much attention in the U.S.—because of the much-larger Boston Marathon bombing investigation.
But with the focus now on Belgium—as a staging area for the Paris terror attacks—it bears taking a second look at the country New York shares borders with: Canada.
The new Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said his country will still accept 25,000 Syrian refugees before January 1st, 2016. But he’s under pressure to make sure screening procedures for the refugees are thorough, after a report that one of the Paris attackers slipped in to Greece with
migrants from war-torn Syria.
Montreal is just 45 miles north of the New York border with Canada.
In March this year, a Tunisian doctoral student—Chiheb Esseghaier—was convicted of plotting to blow up the Amtrak train that travels daily from Toronto to New York’s Penn Station.
Raed Jaser was also convicted.
Esseghaier was living in Montreal, when he was arrested. Three weeks before he was grabbed by police in April 2013, Esseghaier had visited an Al Qaeda associate in New York City.
In the months after the 9/11 attacks, PIX 11 had paid a brief visit to Montreal. Law enforcement sources told us then that 80% of the Islamic extremists living in Canada were based in Quebec and Ontario.
The lead agent for U.S. Customs then, at the Rousses Point border station in New York, was Michael Bridgeman.
He observed the extremists being watched were living “directly above the state of New York.”
U.S. Customs was merged with other agencies into Homeland Security, and the monitoring of the Canadian/U.S. border remains a top priority.
So far, any attempts by fanatics living in Canada to launch strikes in the United States have been unsuccessful.
But extremists did execute two, deadly attacks in October 2014 that seemed to be of the “lone wolf” variety.
On October 22, 2014—Corporal Nathan Cirillo was fatally shot during his sentry duty at the Canadian War Memorial in Ottawa.
The attacker, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, was a drug addict living in Montreal who had converted to Islam in 2004. His father was Libyan-Canadian.
Zehaf-Bibeau had traveled to Libya. When Zehaf-Bibeau tried to shoot up a Parliament building in Ottawa—just moments after he killed Corporal Cirillo—he was shot 31 times by six officers in the building and died on the scene.
Two days earlier, another fanatic had run over two soldiers in Quebec, killing one of them.
ISIS, at the time, praised the attacks.
The NYPD has had police detectives stationed in Toronto and Montreal since shortly after 9/11—part of a multi-agency task force to share information between the two countries.
Now, more than ever, that work remains extremely vital for U.S. border security.
http://pix11.com/2015/11/16/canada-w...ork-a-concern/
