[LINK] "Long, winding road from Senegal to Canada and back home for accused terrorist"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Allan Woods reports on a Senegalese accused terrorist with Canadian connections and his personal history.

As the child of a Senegalese diplomat, Assane Kamara was accustomed to finding his place in unfamiliar lands. In his 24 years, he had lived in Ivory Coast, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Madagascar.

But his privileged upbringing veered off course in 2014, prompting his worried mother to launch a search for her son, and leading her from the family home in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, to Friday prayers in an Edmonton mosque.

As she forced him to return home, a member of the Kamara family said that the questions swirled. What had become of the young man sent for an education at Quebec’s Université de Sherbrooke? Why had he cut contact with his family and moved to western Canada? And who were the devout Canadian Muslims he now counted as his closest friends?

In the months following the intervention, three of those friends — Samir Halilovic, Zakria Habibi and Youssef Sakhir — would flee Canada to try and join Daesh, the Islamic terror group in Syria and Iraq.

Today, Kamara sits in a Dakar jail facing terrorism charges that were laid in February 2016, based on allegations he had planned to join a jihadist group, Henry Boumy Ciss, a spokesperson for Senegal’s National Police, told the Star.