When Daryl Nelson called his close friend John Nuttall last Sunday to play paintball, he was disturbed by the evasive responses he got. Nuttall, now facing terrorism charges after a foiled bomb plot targeting the B.C. legislature, first claimed he was out of town in the Okanagan. Then he said he was in Victoria. And then he changed his mind again, purporting to be in Kelowna. “He kept switching his story and it was like more and more secretive,” Nelson said in an interview. Twenty-four hours later, Nuttall and his common-law spouse Amanda Korody were in jail, accused of being inspired by al-Qaida and planting pressure cooker bombs to detonate during Victoria’s Canada Day celebrations. It was particularly troubling for Nelson given that Nuttall had expressed outrage at the exact same terrorist tactic in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in April. “He was saying it gives Muslims a bad name and all this other crap,” Nelson said. “Then all of a sudden he goes and does something like this … Now what I am starting to think, he was just telling me that so I would never perceive him as that sort of threat.” Nelson said he was happy at first for Nuttall when he found religion about three years ago. He thought it would keep the 38-year-old former heavy metal guitarist from relapsing into the hard drugs that had stolen much of his adult life and left him with a string of convictions. Then he began to see a change in his friend that troubled him. Nuttall got rid of all his cherished guitars despite his passion for music. While he still loved to play paintball and wear fatigues, he began to criticize Canada’s role in Afghanistan. “Before he was a proud Canadian,” Nelson said. “Later he said all I care about is Allah and that Canadians and Americans shouldn’t even be in Iraq and Afghanistan at all.” They would debate for hours, whether it was in Nuttall’s basement suite on Scott Road and 97A Avenue or when they were out playing paintball in the woods around Surrey. He listened to radical Islamic tapes or had prayers playing on his computer. Nuttall urged Nelson to consider converting to Islam as well. Nelson did a lot of reading, but said he remains an avowed “atheist.” “About five or six months ago, he told me that he was kicked out of the mosque because he had disagreed with one of their teachings,” Nelson said. He began seeing less and less of Nuttall over the last few months as his friend, who lived on a B.C. government disability pension, claimed to be working in a furniture store and to be delivering packages “for his Muslim brothers.” “We’d pop in every now and again or he would give me a call. But it really got suspicious. I thought he was transporting drugs for them because when he told me he was delivering packages to business-suit kind of guys,” Nelson said. The packages were wrapped in plastic and Nuttall said he would collect money to deliver back to his employer, whom Nelson met a few times.

“I said to him, ‘Doesn’t that sound a little bit weird?’ and he said no,” Nelson recalled. “He told me it was paperwork ‘to help my Muslim brothers come to Canada.’ And I said are you sure about that? It sounded like a transaction.” Despite his suspicions, he never imagined Nuttall was capable of committing a terrorist act. He echoed what others have said about Nuttall being mentally affected by years of drug use and easily manipulated. “I am as surprised as everybody else that he got caught up in anything like that,” said Nelson, who has known Nuttall and Korody since the couple moved to Surrey about four years ago. “Personally I think he was hanging out with the wrong people and they screwed with his head a little bit. He was always a few screws loose from drug abuse and everything else he went through, so he was very easily swayed.” Nelson’s stepfather Barry Harder also played paintball and socialized with Nuttall and Korody over the years. Nuttall briefly worked with him and Nelson at a painting job, but it didn’t last. Harder said he finds the allegations against his friend “unnerving.” “I would never have thought of him to be any kind of a terrorist, he said. “From what I know he was always happy, lots of bounce in his step. Every time he would see me, he would say hi.” He said Korody, a St. Catharines native, was “always quiet and reserved” and that Nuttall clearly dominated the relationship. But it was a different story when they were at paintball — “She was good at it. She was ruthless.” While the RCMP have provided few details of how investigators foiled the terrorist plot, they said they became aware of the threat posed by the “self-radicalized” couple in February and began an undercover probe. Three “inert” pressure cooker bombs were seized outside the legislature Monday as the couple was arrested passing through Abbotsford. Police said that while the pair had embraced al-Qaida’s ideology, they had no assistance from inside Canada or abroad. In November 2012, a user that appears to be Nuttall uploaded a video to YouTube questioning whether the NATO-led invasion of Libya was to stop its leader from implementing a pan-African currency based on gold. Around the same time a spate of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli YouTube comments are linked to the same user. After another commenter insulted the Prophet Muhammad, Nuttall challenged him to come to the train tracks at Scott Road and 99th Avenue for a fight, calling the other commenter a pagan in Arabic. “Call me so we can set this up kaffir mushriqun,” the user wrote. “But by the sounds of you, I may as well march my wife up there to fight you. Im waiting...” The phone number in that comment links to what appears to be other Nuttall posts in a popular Internet forum for Metro Vancouver’s paintballers, which he made over the last half of 2012. Going by the Arabic user name Mujahid, or inner-struggler, he and Korody, linked to the user name PirateNinjaCat, wrote friendly posts asking for rides from other paintball enthusiasts to weekend games.

“We dont live near any affordable woodsball (paintball) fields, so we get together with a couple friends and go for a hike into the woods or mountains and we bring our own paint,” Nuttall wrote in his introductory post in June of last year. He also detailed how he had modified his paintball guns to shoot marbles. “I have never had to use it, but as I live in Surrey BC, this setup will do nicely to deter any would be home invaders...(a big problem in my neighbourhood) until we get a real weapon.” Both Nelson and landlady Shanti Thaman said a lot of questions remain unanswered. How could such unsophisticated people living a subsistence life on a methadone treatment program have the means to carry out a terrorist bombing? They had no car, or even bikes to get around. Nuttall had borrowed $20 from both Nelson and Thaman in the week before his arrest. Despite police stressing that Nuttall and Korody had no international links, the charges allege they were working “for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group.” The search warrant documents left in the couple’s suite state that police were looking for “wooden matches, Christmas lights, pipe, mortar and pestle, metal coffee grinder, dremel, speaker wire, electrician tape, pressure cooker, batteries, clocks with moving hands, nails, ball bearings, shrapnel, steel pellets, electric drill, copper wire, soldering gun, solder, flux, marble gun, paint ball guns, fireworks, ammunition, any items used to manufacture a bomb or rocket, electronic storage devices including, but not limited to, hard drives, thumb drives, SD cards, data storage devices, including external storage devices, computers, any documents, materials or items related to the recruitment or radicalization of individuals who participate in jihad, any documents, materials or items related to the making of explosives and/or explosive devices, any document, materials or items related to terrorism or terrorist activity, any documents relating to diagrams, maps or lists and documents identifying persons in possession and control of the premises.” During a tour of the suite, a Sun reporter saw both Saudi and Iranian money tacked to a bulletin board. There was a poster for a protest in May against Monsanto, a multinational company that produces genetically modified wheat. A damaged TV in the bedroom was painted with the words MK-Ultra, an apparent reference to a controversial CIA brainwashing program that ran from the 1950s to the early ‘70s. After the charges, many are distancing themselves from the couple. Nuttall’s former band Lust Boys issued a statement saying, “Lust Boys have never endorsed nor been affiliated with any terrorist plots. The actions played out by John Nuttall were one of an individual’s radical thinking and poor decision-making and should have no reflection on the Lust Boys as a whole.” Leaders of the Muslim community are also concerned about their religion being unfairly linked to the case against Nuttall and Korody. “Islam is a religion and the principle of Islam is peace,” said Adam Buksh, past president of the B.C. Muslim Association.