A Montreal couple has been acquitted of terrorism-related offences, but the young man has been found guilty of a reduced explosives charge, after a bomb-making recipe was found at their home.

El Mahdi Jamali, 20, and Sabrine Djermane, 21, were both accused of attempting to leave Canada to commit a terrorist act, committing an act for the profit of a terrorist group, and possessing explosive materials.

The former Collège de Maisonneuve students, who lived together at the time, were arrested in 2015 after Djermane’s sisters reported to anti-terrorism investigators their suspicions that she had been radicalized and planned to travel overseas to join Islamic State militants.

When the RCMP began investigating reports that the couple supported ISIS and planned to leave, they found a handwritten recipe for a pressure cooker bomb at their home which had been copied from an Al Qaeda propaganda magazine. At Jamali’s parents’ home, where the couple lived previously, they found a bag of ingredients named in the recipe, like matches, a clock, coffee filters, and nails that Jamali had bought with his debit card at Dollarama.

While Djermane was acquitted on all counts, Jamali was found guilty of a reduced charge — possession of an explosive substance without a lawful excuse. This explosives charge was added by Superior Court Justice Marc David when he was instructing the jury. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail. Jamali has already served the equivalent of 48 months of his sentence, according to the Montreal Gazette.

'Intellectual curiosity'

Crown prosecutor Lyne Décarie attempted to make the case that both Djermane and Jamali, who were arrested two weeks before they were set to fly to Greece, were planning to travel to Syria. But Djermane's lawyer Charles Benmouyal argued the Crown had only proved the couple planned to travel to Greece so they could get married, despite their parents' disapproval.

The Crown also presented evidence that Djermane and Jamali used their laptops and tablets to look at various articles and videos made by known terrorists, which were available on mainstream websites and YouTube, but Jamali’s lawyer Tiago Murias characterized his client’s actions as “intellectual curiosity.”

During closing arguments, Murias said there was no firm evidence that his client supported ISIS, nor concrete proof they planned to go to Syria. Rather, he argued, the couple was going on vacation. The items the Crown had argued were bomb ingredients were just household objects, Murias said.