A B.C. Supreme Court judge will hand down his verdict today in the case of a Fort St. John man facing a number of terrorism charges.
Othman Hamdan was arrested and charged in July 2015 with various terrorist offences, including counselling to commit murder on behalf of the Islamic State.
Police began investigating the 36-year-old after he indicated his support for ISIL and for lone-wolf attacks in 85 Facebook posts over several months.
Federal prosecutors argued that one of the posts was was a how-to guide for committing a lone wolf attack, including using vehicles to run people down.
Hamdan took the stand in his own defence and testified that the posts were taken out of context and that the translations from Arabic weren’t accurate.
He also called an imam as a defence witness who testified the posts don’t mean what they appear to mean when viewed in the context of Islamic culture and scholarship.
The judge-alone trial began in June before Justice Bruce Butler at the Vancouver Law Courts.
When Hamdan was arrested at his Fort St. John apartment building, neighbours described him as a classic loner.
Hamdan came to Canada via the U.S. in 2002 and was accepted as a refugee claimant. He’s originally from Jordan and claimed he would be persecuted if he went back there. He’s not a Canadian citizen.
He lived in the Peace River area for at least three years where he registered a house-building company, Noex Contracting, in April 2012. The company’s address on corporate records is the same suite on 86th Street where he was arrested.
More to come…
