OTTAWA — An alleged Somali kidnapper who calls the mother of his Canadian hostage to demand a ransom should not be afforded Charter rights that protect the privacy of his conversations, a federal lawyer has argued.
Federal prosecutor Croft Michaelson said the man, who identified himself as “Adam,” had no reasonable expectation of privacy when he made a series of long-distance phone calls to Lorinda Stewart after her daughter, Amanda Lindhout, was seized and held for ransom in Mogadishu with Australian photographer Nigel Brennan on Aug. 23, 2008.
Lindhout and Brennan were released 15 months later after their two families paid $600,000 in ransom through a private British security firm.
One of the men allegedly involved in the kidnapping, Somali national Ali Omar Ader, was lured to Canada in June 2015 at the conclusion of an elaborate, five-year RCMP undercover operation and charged under extraterritorial provisions of the Criminal Code. He faces a kidnapping trial in October.
Pre-trial motions in the case are now being heard.
“There’s something strange here,” Michaelson argued Wednesday in opposing a defence motion that seeks to throw out a significant portion of the government’s wiretap evidence. “We’re almost extending the protections of the Charter to the hostage-taker in Somalia who picks up his phone and calls his victim’s mother in Canada.”
He cited as a precedent for his argument a Supreme Court of British Columbia case in which the court said it was not reasonable for an extortionist to expect his conversations to remain private.
Similarly, Michaelson said, “Adam” — prosecutors contend that “Adam” was one of Ader’s aliases — could not have had a reasonable expectation that his ransom demands were a private affair. As a result, he said, Ader should not be afforded protection against the RCMP’s wiretap intrusions.
What’s more, Michaelson urged Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Smith to consider all of the circumstances surrounding the hostage-taker’s phone calls, which were intercepted and recorded by the RCMP pursuant to 17 court orders issued over eight years.
At least 29 phone calls from “Adam” were recorded by police before Lindhout and Brennan were released on Nov. 26, 2009.
Defence lawyer Trevor Brown has argued that the RCMP and the courts made a series of errors that had a “cascading effect,” and rendered invalid many of the wiretap authorizations.
Michaelson, however, argued that all of the wiretap authorizations would have been granted by a judge even if the deficient material had first been excised. There was still “unimpeachable” evidence, he said, to support a wiretap order, including phone messages from the hostage-taker and taped conversations between Lindhout and her mother in which they discussed Adam’s ransom demands.
“I say they build upon one another and create a formidable battery of grounds (for wiretap authorizations),” Michaelson said.
Ader, who speaks some English, has been following the pre-trial motions on headphones that provide him with a Somali translation of the court proceedings. He’s a tall man, slightly balding, and was wearing a grey dress shirt and grey pants. He sits stock still while court is session.
Court has heard that the man known as “Adam” repeatedly threatened to kill Lindhout unless her mother, or the Canadian government, came up with $1.5 million in ransom. In phone calls recorded in October 2008, Adam was angry that the Canadian government had refused to pay, and believed that Australian authorities were lying to him. He gave Lindhout’s mother a 10-day deadline to produce the ransom.
“If we don’t get, we will kill,” he said.
The pre-trial motions continue Monday.
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