B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce said the Mounties used trickery, deceit and veiled threats to engineer the terrorist acts for which John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested on Canada Day three years ago.

VANCOUVER — A British Columbia couple found guilty of terrorism charges have had their verdicts tossed out in a scathing court decision that flays the RCMP for its "egregious" conduct in manipulating naive suspects into carrying out a police-manufactured crime.

John Nuttall and Amanda Korody embrace at B.C. Supreme Court on July 29, 2016 after a judge ruled the couple were entrapped by the RCMP. (Photo: Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press)

The couple believed they were planting pressure-cooker bombs to kill and maim crowds gathered to celebrate at the B.C. legislature.

"The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more," Bruce said in a landmark ruling Friday as she characterized the RCMP's methods as "multi-faceted and systematic manipulation."

"There is clearly a need to curtail the actions of police ... to ensure that future undercover investigations do not follow the same path."

Bruce said Mounties involved in a months-long sting launched in early 2013 knowingly exploited Nuttall and Korody's vulnerabilities to induce them to commit an offence.

She described the pair as marginalized, socially isolated, former heroin addicts dependent on methadone and welfare to subsist and said they were "all talk and no action."

"The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people." — Judge Catherine Bruce

Nuttall and Korody were recent converts to Islam. Their trial heard Nuttall say in a recording that he wanted to kill and maim countless people during Canada Day festivities in retaliation for Canada's role in the mistreatment of Muslims in Afghanistan and other countries.

Without the heavy-handed involvement of undercover officers, it would have been impossible for Nuttall and Korody to articulate, craft and execute a terrorist bomb plot, Bruce said.

"Ultimately, their role in carrying out the plan was minuscule compared to what the police had to do," Bruce said. "It was the police who were the leaders of the plot."

She also condemned the behaviour of the primary undercover officer who, at the direction of the operation's overseers, discouraged Nuttall and Korody from seeking outside spiritual guidance and convinced them he was a member of a powerful international terrorist group that would likely kill them if they failed to follow through.

Free after years behind bars

"He was their leader and they were his disciples," said Bruce, who stayed the proceedings, which threw out the convictions and allowed the couple to walk free after more than three years behind bars.

They embraced outside B.C. Supreme Court before being temporarily re-arrested and later released from provincial court under a peace bond, which places them under strict conditions for up to a year.