November 01-2013
A 71-year-old Iranian-Canadian was arrested at the Montreal airport Sunday after police found bomb-making materials in his carry-on luggage.
The actual explosives to make the bomb were missing. And the man said the luggage wasn’t his—he was just holding it for someone else, whom he has not yet identified.
The incident paralyzed Trudeau Airport for several hours and caused a neighborhood to be shut down as the police searched the suspect’s home.
The man’s legal name is Anthony Piazza, which he changed 27 years ago from his original name, Houshang Nazemi. He arrived in Canada in 1979 and is a naturalized Canadian.
In 1985, he was given a 10-year sentence for drug trafficking in Quebec. In 1992, he was convicted of fraud. And in 1996, he was fined $1,000 for violating Canada’s copyright laws in his shop, which sold Persian language films.
He now faces three charges — possession of an explosive substance; attempting to transport an explosive substance on an airplane; and mischief by endangering the safety of an airport or aircraft and disrupting activity at the airport.
Crown lawyer—the term for prosecutor in Canada—Alexandre Gauthier said the mischief charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail.
“The investigation is still ongoing and it’s hard to tell what’s going to come out of it right now,” Gauthier said.
Police said the material found in luggage at the airport terminal contained everything needed to make a bomb — except the actual explosives.
The bomb components were found in carry-on luggage—but not inside the valise. They were hidden inside the pull-out handle, further fueling suspicions.
Defense lawyer Louis Morena said Nazemi was holding the carry-on bag for someone else. But who that was is unknown. “He doesn’t say,” Morena said of his client. “He simply says it belonged to someone else.”
His lawyer revealed some of the items police said they’d identified in the bag. “They were talking about bullets, talking about powder, about wires, about [lighters],” Morena said.
“It’s not an explosive substance in itself, but it’s an explosive substance in the sense of the Criminal Code,” Gauthier said, meaning that the criminal code includes bomb-making materials within the explosives law.
“For us, it is something major because everything was there to make us believe … [it could have been] a bomb, an explosive device,” police spokesman Ian Lafreniere told The Canadian Press.
As a result of the incident, there were long delays for flights Sunday. The police questioned everyone who was on Nazemi’s flight bound for Los Angeles, presumably suspicious that Nazemi might have been planning to team up with another passenger carrying the actual explosives.
Hours later, police closed off a Montreal neighborhood to search an apartment in the residential area of LaSalle and seized some documents from Nazemi’s home.
Even though he changed his named to Piazza, Nazemi did an interview with La Presse newspaper in 2006 where he identified himself by his birth name. The interview had to do with a video store he once owned, International Sun Video, which specialized in Iranian films.
