MONTREAL—As Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale promised to toughen the requirements on terror suspects who are subject to restrictive peace bonds, newly unsealed court documents show police feared one Montreal man could launch an attack in Canada if he were prevented from travelling abroad.

The warning from RCMP Cpl. Brenda Makad is contained in a police affidavit used in support of a peace bond application in 2015 against Daniel Minta Darko.

“Even though I believe that the desire to leave Canada in order to join the fighting in Syria is Darko’s priority, the call to action in the West and the incidents Canada has suffered recently lead me to fear that faced with the impossibility of leaving, Darko would act here,” Makad said in the affidavit.

The 28-year-old Muslim convert, along with Merouane Ghalmi, 24, travelled halfway around the world to try to “shuffle the cards” and throw authorities off their trail, the police allege in the affidavit. They were intercepted in Turkey and returned to Canada, the affidavit said.

In Canada, RCMP officers investigated and interviewed the two men. Individual affidavits of the interviews were then used to obtain peace bonds — with restrictive conditions — against both. Among the allegations in the police affidavits: Darko lied to police and Daesh propaganda was found on his cellphone, and Ghalmi enjoyed a close friendship with Canadian jihadist Sami Elabi. The two affidavits were released in a Montreal court Wednesday after a media challenge of the sealing order.

Darko did not respond to a request for an interview. Ghalmi could not be reached for comment. The peace bonds against the two men were in effect for 12 months and expired earlier this year, Crown prosecutor Lyne Décarie said in an email to the Star.

Goodale’s focus on peace bonds comes just days after Aaron Driver, a 24-year-old Daesh sympathizer, was shot dead by police in Strathroy, Ont. Driver was within 72 hours of committing a terror attack on Canadian soil, police have claimed. Driver was under a peace bond with restrictive conditions, and was still able to acquire bomb-making materials and make a “martyrdom video.”

It’s the restrictive nature of peace bonds that has least one expert wondering if they only further isolate would-be radicals.

The problem with peace bonds, said Canadian terrorism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam, is that there are only restrictions—on movement, on communication, on association—without positive intervention.

“There is no followup, no attempt to provide further help and supervision,” he said. “We tell them what they can’t do and leave it at that.”

Peace bonds are used to place restrictions on the movements and associations of people who are believed by police to be at risk of committing a criminal offence, even if there is insufficient evidence to show that a law has been broken. A peace bond is not an admission of guilt and must be agreed to by the person it is issued for. Police have used them a handful of times on people deemed to be at risk of committing a terrorism offence.

In the case of the two Montreal men, the Mounties suspected Darko and Ghalmi had travelled from Montreal to Toronto to Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Istanbul, Turkey, with the goal of joining a terrorist group in Syria, the police affidavit said.

Darko and Ghalmi left Canada on Jan. 22, 2015, and were turned back by Turkish authorities on Jan. 28, 2015, after arriving in Istanbul, the affidavits said.

They returned to Montreal less than two weeks after leaving and were questioned by national security investigators about the depth of their commitment and beliefs, the police affidavit said.

The details of the Montreal case raise some of the same questions now being asked publicly in the debate over the death of Driver, including how closely individuals believed to pose a terror threat are being tracked in Canada as well as what support, counselling and intervention they should or do receive.

In Ottawa Wednesday, Goodale said the federal government is now considering tougher conditions for terror-related peace bonds that could include mandatory de-radicalization counselling as a package of reforms to last year’s anti-terrorism legislation.

Goodale told reporters that while peace bonds could be a useful tool in controlling individuals deemed to pose a terror risk, they are “not a panacea.”

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The case involving Driver and the fact that he was able to assemble a bomb as well as produce and post a chilling martyrdom video to the web while supposedly barred from having a computer and cellphone shows that “one particular tool obviously was not effective in dealing with that particular case,” Goodale said.

In the Montreal case, Ghalmi, a former kick-boxer, was allegedly the mastermind behind the plan to leave Canada for Syria, the affidavit said. He had tried unsuccessfully to make the trip in July 2013 but was arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border and returned home, the six-page affidavit outlining the police investigation said.

Ghalmi also had the on-the-ground contacts in both countries, including a close friendship with Canadian jihadist, Sami Elabi, who has fought with the Free Syrian Army, Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra, the police affidavit said.

It was Ghalmi who invited Darko to come with him just five days before their departure, which the RCMP learned about only after being tipped off in a telephone call from Ghalmi’s worried sister, according to the police affidavit.

After the two men were turned back from Turkey and returned to Montreal, their passports were seized and they were brought in for questioning, Ghalmi was open about his beliefs under questioning by the police, the affidavit said.

On his computer, police discovered photos of dead jihadists, as well as audio files of speeches by leaders of Daesh and Ansar Al-Charia, although Ghalmi allegedly told investigators that the extremist militant group Ahrar Al-Sham was the one that he felt most drawn toward, the affidavit said.

He told investigators that living an Islamic life in the West was like trying to mix “oil and vinegar,” and he felt judged while living in Montreal because of his beard and his lifestyle and said that having his passport seized or being included on a no-fly list would not deter him from his ultimate goal, the affidavit said.

“I won’t be on it for 50 years,” he said of the no-fly list, according to the affidavit. “In the end I will leave.”

Darko, who was born in Ghana and had converted to Islam, was evasive under questioning from police and was caught lying about numerous aspects of his and Ghalmi’s meandering route toward combat, the 12-page affidavit said.

Police nevertheless scoured his computer, the contents of which had been erased before leaving Canada, and his cellphone to discover several items of Daesh propaganda, the affidavit said. Investigators also found an image on Facebook from 2012 showing Darko in the company of nine other young Muslims from Montreal, including Mohamed Rifaat, who was among a group that successfully fled to Syria in mid-Janruary 2015, the affidavit said.

With files from Tonda MacCharles

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