In a chilling plan played to his jury, accused terrorist Raed Jaser said he wanted to target government leaders with a sniper rifle and suggested former Toronto mayor Rob Ford was someone easy to get to.

On an audio tape secretly recorded by an undercover FBI agent more than two years ago, Jaser explains that he wants to “fight the leaders” and unlike their American counterparts, Canadian government officials are “easily” accessible.

“Here in Canada, it’s different. They do public speech(es),” Jaser says on the tape recorded by the agent’s body pack on Sept. 9, 2012. “There’s a gay parade, you find that they come to the gay parade, OK? The reason is because they feel safe, bunch of faggots.

“You know what I mean? Who’s gonna attack them? They’re just like them,” he says. “That’s when we hit them. This is the plan. Also in the church...”

As an example, Jaser mentions the leader of the city, who was Ford at the time.

“The mayor of Toronto is useless. He takes the subway in Toronto,” Jaser says on the recording. “Yeah, these people are in Toronto. Canada is different. Canada is not the U.S. They don’t have these protective services but they feel safe. We’re gonna change that.”

First, though, he needs to get a gun licence and buy a rifle, he says. “This is long term. I just need to practise.”

Jaser, a 37-year-old permanent resident employed by a moving company, and Esseghaier, a 31-year-old Tunisian PhD student working in Quebec, have pleaded not guilty to several terror-related charges, including plotting to derail a passenger train travelling between New York and Toronto in 2012.

The American operative’s audio recordings of his meetings with the two alleged Islamic radicals are the cornerstone of the Crown’s case, which opened Monday. He told the jury that he posed as a wealthy American businessman with radical Islamic views when he befriended Esseghaier on a flight to California in June 2012. After several months of correspondence, he said he flew to meet him in Montreal and together they drove to Toronto to meet Esseghaier’s alleged co-conspirator, the “brother from Palestine.”

Along the way, the agent said Esseghaier told him about his al-Qaida-linked friend in Iran who gave him the idea to derail a train by drilling a hole in the tracks above a bridge. A second idea, he said, was to find a Muslim cook who would poison soldiers on their military base.

But this was the first time that he had heard anything about sniper attacks, the agent testified.

When he first met Jaser at his Toronto home, the undercover officer says he was in “full Islamic garb” and wore a very long beard — an appearance very different from the clean-cut man in the prisoner’s box who sports a trim beard and suit and tie.

Almost immediately after being introduced, the agent says Jaser told him that security was imperative and they should always shut off their phones when together. “We are being watched. The government knows who we are and where we are at all times,” he quoted Jaser as saying.

How correct he was.

During a walk through his residential neighbourhood, Jaser warmed to the undercover officer who was secretly recording his various plans. As Esseghaier often asked his advice and ceded to his opinion, Jaser could be heard raging about Western soldiers in Muslim lands and how they deserved terror at home. “An eye for an eye,” he is recorded saying. “And the oppressor is who started it.”

They appeared to settle on December for the train attack and the agent was tasked with securing an apartment in Hamilton and the machinery they’d need to drill through steel. He was also to be in charge of uploading their manifesto video after hundreds of American and Canadian rail passengers plunged to their deaths.

“We are in your neighbourhood,” Jaser says their video will warn. “Get out, get out before we kill you all. Because we want this whole city, the whole country to burn. I could care less who dies. Everyone is a target.”

And in the meantime, Jaser would also be trying to secure a sniper rifle.

“Is it easy to get?” the FBI agent asks.

“Very easy,” Jaser replies. “Very easy.”

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