Zakaria Amara issued a surprise guilty plea in a Brampton courtroom, more than 40 months after he and 17 others were arrested in connection with the most audacious and ambitious terrorist attack planned in Canada as part of the “Toronto 18.”
Pleading guilty to two counts of terrorism will likely garner Amara, the plot’s ringleader, life in prison.
Raised in the suburbs by an Arab father and a Cypriot mother, Amara has been portrayed as an unlikely Islamic warrior. He says he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox church. In his teens he married an observant, niqab-wearing wife, who soon bore him a baby. News sources claim that she urged him to do something dramatic for Islam.
