An alleged Islamic State supporter accused of planning an attack in Toronto this summer with his son has been charged with four separate war crimes, the first time RCMP say such charges have been laid in Canada.
The charges against Ahmed Eldidi come months after the federal opposition MPs grilled Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and leaders from the RCMP and Canada’s spy and border agencies about a propaganda video broadcast by the terrorist group that the politicians alleged depict Mr. Eldidi dismembering a prisoner a decade ago.
The RCMP announced the direct indictment of Mr. Eldidi, 62, on Tuesday. He appeared in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Newmarket on Monday.
The investigation by the RCMP’s Toronto-area counterterrorism unit, which is part of its Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, first led to the arrests of Mr. Eldidi and his son Mostafa Eldidi, 26, in a hotel in Richmond Hill, Ont., at the end of July.
The pair initially faced nine terrorism charges, including conspiracy to commit murder on behalf of the Islamic State. Police have alleged the duo were “in the advanced stages of planning a serious, violent attack in Toronto,” with a machete and an axe, but have not publicly released their alleged targets.
At the time, the elder Mr. Eldidi was also charged with the aggravated assault of someone outside of Canada in 2015, allegedly done “for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with” the Islamic State, according to charge documents from that time.
The new indictment alleges that some time between Nov. 25, 2014, and June 16, 2015, somewhere outside of Canada, he committed the separate war crimes of murder, mutilation and torture against a protected person in a “non-international armed conflict,” as well as outrages upon personal dignity.
None of the charges have been proven in court and Mr. Eldidi’s lawyer declined to comment when contacted late Tuesday.
The Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which is in charge of the case, did not respond to a request to clarify whether these charges are related to the propaganda video released by the Islamic State and viewed by The Globe and Mail. The video shows an unmasked man dismembering a prisoner with a sword.
Last summer, Mr. LeBlanc told a parliamentary committee the elder Mr. Eldidi had sought a visitor’s visa in 2017 but was initially refused. He later received the visa after providing additional documentation. In 2018, the Egyptian citizen entered Canada at Toronto Pearson International Airport, and later that year, he received a work permit. In 2021, he became a permanent resident and in May, 2024 – two months before his arrest – he was granted Canadian citizenship.
Larry Brock, Conservative MP for Brantford-Brant, noted during the committee hearing that France’s spy agency alerted Canada to the alleged threat posed by the pair this June.
Aaron McCrorie, vice-president of intelligence and enforcement at the Canada Border Services Agency, testified that the video was “only made available more recently” and not when Mr. Eldidi was screened by his organization and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 2018 or 2021.
Ottawa committed last summer to conducting an internal review into why potential red flags were missed.
Mark Kersten, an assistant criminology professor at the University of the Fraser Valley who also trains agencies abroad on how to investigate war crimes, said European countries have prosecuted many similar war crimes cases based on similar kinds of video evidence published and promoted by the terrorist group.
Canada, he said, has typically opted to deport anyone accused of participating in such activities abroad, but that is not an option in this case as Mr. Eldidi is a citizen.
“When I found out earlier today that they’re going prosecute Eldidi for war crimes I was amazed,” he said. “I was amazed in the sense that I really didn’t think it would happen.”
Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor Queen’s University’s school of religion and department of political science who has researched the Islamic State, said if the video is central to the prosecution’s case, the defence will try to poke holes in whether the prosecution has correctly identified the accused as the same man in the video.
The Crown will be aided in its efforts to narrow down the provenance of the video because the Islamic State typically added a watermark to each video identifying in which individual state of the caliphate it was produced, the professor said.