Religious leaders tasked with rooting out troubled young worshippers at a Burnaby mosque say they didn’t flag the young man now facing terror charges.
David Ali, the Vice-President of the B.C. Muslim Association, says people at the Masjid Al-Salaam Mosque would have taken action had they known something was amiss with 25-year-old Hasib Yusufzai.
“When it came out in the media it was a kind of a shock to me,” said Ali, who said RCMP told him two weeks ago that someone had been charged with travelling to Syria to take up arms with Islamist militants.
“There was a guy here by that name. Not many people remember this guy,” Ali said, adding that he and other Muslim leaders meet with the RCMP every three months to discuss potential radicalization of youths and other safety issues.
“If we had any notion that a person is like that we would put a tail on him. Someone will always be watching people of that kind,” he said.
Yusufzai now faces the first-ever charge of travelling abroad to aid a terrorist group, known as S7. The formal charge, sworn in a Richmond court, accuses Yusufzai of “leaving Canada for the purpose of committing an act or omission outside Canada that, if committed in Canada, would be an indictable offence, to wit, murder…at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group.”
According to the RCMP, Yusufzai left Canada on January 21. Family members say the Mounties have searched his computer, looking for electronic communication and possibly propaganda.
No one at the mosque could recognize 2009 Facebook photos of Yusufzai, who appears shirtless while climbing the Chief in Squamish with an unidentified woman.
Yusufzai immigrated to Canada as a teen from Afghanistan, and was interested in motorcycles, worked as a security guard and wanted to be a police officer.
Several years ago Yusufzai grew a beard and started dressing only in white, neighbours and family said.
“The last time I saw him he had a big beard. I’ve never seen him without the beard,” said John Carscadden, who lives on the same floor as Yusufzai in a subsidized housing complex in Burnaby, Hillside Gardens.
Others in that complex have been approached by Mounties for more information about Yusufzai – a wider net that the RCMP appears to have been waiting until the investigation became public yesterday to cast.
“They were calling everybody in Hillside. Everybody who knows him,” said Nasir Ahmad Ali, who said he was phoned by an officer on Wednesday. Ali, who is Muslim, said he had only seen Yusufzai in that complex and described any fighting as counter to Islam.
“I think people are getting brainwashed. Islam is a peaceful religion. This is bad for the Afghan community, it’s bad for the Muslim community,” he said.
But Carscadden said he had seen only good things next door.
“Everybody’s asking questions about what happened. We don’t know anything. But I stand by my neighbours. They’re good Canadians,” he said.
