A riveting Islamic condition story, advised in a New York Times podcast, falls apart

He explained the killings in lurid element — how he shot a person male in the head and stabbed one more in the coronary heart ahead of hanging the corpse on a cross.

He spoke at duration about signing up for the religious police of the Islamic State in Syria, and staying trucked to a terrorist education session on attacking the West, like North The united states, his homeland.

He recounted how Islamic Condition commanders exhibited maps and colour-coded guidance, showing recruits like him how to strike big Western targets, get into restricted regions, get rid of people today and attain martyrdom.

They envisioned “something as breathtaking as 9/11,” he explained. “They desired to outdo al-Qaida, make their mark.”

But Shehroze Chaudhry, the central determine in the 2018 podcast “Caliphate,” by The New York Moments, was a fabulist who spun jihadi tales about killing for the Islamic Condition in Syria, Canadian and U.S. intelligence and legislation enforcement officials contend.

Chaudhry, they say, was not a terrorist, nearly surely hardly ever went to Syria and concocted gruesome stories about remaining an Islamic Point out executioner as component of a Walter Mitty-like escape from his far more mundane lifetime in a Toronto suburb and in Lahore, Pakistan, where he spent yrs residing with his grandparents.

Chaudhry’s elaborate accounts, instructed to The Times and other information stores, brought on a political uproar in Canada. The award-winning “Caliphate” series broadcast his statements of killing for the Islamic Condition to millions of listeners, fueling outrage that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s govt had allowed a terrorist to reside freely in suburban Toronto despite the crimes Chaudhry had so openly confessed to committing in Syria.

Now, Chaudhry’s general public declarations have put him in lawful jeopardy. In September, Canadian authorities charged Chaudhry with perpetrating a terrorist hoax, a felony charge that could provide up to 5 several years in jail if he is convicted.

Tracking the thousands of fighters who have traveled from throughout the environment to battle with the Islamic Condition is a sprawling, usually murky, undertaking. In advance of “Caliphate” aired, two U.S. officials explained to The Situations that Chaudhry experienced, in truth, joined the Islamic Point out and crossed into Syria. And some of the people today who know and have recommended Chaudhry say they have no question that he holds extremist, jihadi views.

But Canadian law enforcement officers, who performed an pretty much four-calendar year investigation into Chaudhry, say their assessment of his travel and financial data, social media posts, statements to police and other intelligence make them assured that he did not enter Syria or join the Islamic Point out, much much less commit the grievous crimes he explained.

U.S. officers interviewed for this write-up assist the summary that Chaudhry, who turns 26 on Saturday, was under no circumstances a terrorist danger. It is tough to say with absolute certainty that he under no circumstances entered Syria, they alert.

But even if he did, they contend, it would have been for a temporary time period — in which he claimed to have joined the Islamic State, acquired religious and weapons coaching, gone on patrols, meted out punishment, carried out executions and participated in key discussions about plotting substantial-profile attacks in opposition to the West.

“Hoaxes can crank out dread inside our communities and develop the illusion there is a probable menace to Canadians, though we have identified if not,” Superintendent Christopher deGale, head of the national protection crew that done the investigation, reported in a assertion about the case.

The “Caliphate” series lifted concerns about some of Chaudhry’s assertions and devoted an episode of the podcast to them. Following the Canadians billed Chaudhry with a hoax, The Situations examined his scenario all over again, using a new glance at social media posts, photographs, journey information, tutorial transcripts and other opportunity evidence that could lose mild on his rivalry that he had joined, and killed for, the Islamic Point out in Syria.

The overview recognized a timeline of his actions, which did not rule out the likelihood that Chaudhry went to Syria inside a narrow window of a couple months. But it also identified a heritage of misrepresentations by Chaudhry — which include applying photos of fighters in Syria that ended up out there on the world wide web and passing them off as his have to portray himself as an Islamic Point out member — that casts enough question on his claims. In truth, the review discovered no unbiased corroboration of Chaudhry’s participation in the atrocities he claims to have fully commited in the “Caliphate” podcast.

As a outcome of the evaluate, The Instances on Friday printed an editors’ note that the podcast was “not sufficiently rigorous” and that the episodes presenting Chaudhry’s claims did not fulfill its expectations.

‘His actual lifestyle is a bit dull’

Today, Chaudhry spends significantly of his time in Large Grill, his family’s shawarma and kebab shop in a sprawling and busy strip shopping mall in Oakville, a suburb outdoors of Toronto.

On a latest afternoon, Chaudhry was implementing toppings and wrapping up takeout orders as a continuous stream of buyers manufactured their way into the cafe. A brightly lit image of a shawarma rotisserie sat in the window, alongside a note giving free of charge foods to people today remaining hungry by the coronavirus pandemic.

“He’s bored,” claimed Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario, who has been counseling Chaudhry for a lot more than three decades and believes his account of becoming a member of the Islamic Condition in Syria. “His real daily life is a little bit boring.”

Chaudhry declined to remark, but his law firm, Nader R. Hasan, said that his customer would dispute the hoax cost. Less than the legislation, prosecutors not only require to clearly show that Chaudhry lied, but that he also meant to frighten the community into wondering that terrorists have been about to lead to “death, bodily harm” or substantial home harm.

“Mr. Chaudhry has been billed with a incredibly significant felony offense of which he is not responsible,” Hasan wrote in an email to The Moments, devoid of specifying how he would contest the cost.

Legal professionals say Chaudhry’s protection will almost certainly obstacle the 2nd prerequisite of the hoax cost — that he meant to sow dread.

Cultivating a persona

The Royal Canadian Mounted Law enforcement, the national police pressure and other security companies commenced investigating Chaudhry in late 2016, right after he posted on social media that he had “been to the battlefield” in Syria for “a little bit significantly less than a year” and shared images on the net to cultivate his graphic as an Islamic State warrior.

Even at the time, Chaudhry’s social media promises supplied small proof. His postings, compiled by researchers, confirmed photographs of silhouetted fighters holding assault rifles in a jagged, rocky landscape. Chaudhry described the rugged placing as his “humble abode.”

But much from proving Chaudhry’s jihadi bona fides, at the very least a single of the pictures was a brazen duplicate of broadly obtainable information pictures, The Times’ assessment observed. The original image had been taken months previously by a photographer for the formal Russian news agency Tass, and experienced been distributed by Getty Photos, a person of the world’s major suppliers of photos.

Other visuals Chaudhry presented as proof that he had absent to Syria — specifically, snapshots he said he had taken of armed guys at the beach, whom he explained as his “fellow fighters” — also proved to be similar to photos that had been posted on Twitter a long time ahead of by Syrian anti-war activists, The Times’ assessment found. And as with other photos, Chaudhry misrepresented — or probably didn’t really know — where by, and sometimes when, they experienced been taken.

Canadian officials did not say just when they turned persuaded that Chaudhry experienced fabricated large components of his tale, but they insist it didn’t get pretty extended to determine out. Ralph Goodale, the Canadian public basic safety minister in 2015-19, explained he experienced information suggesting that Chaudhry’s accounts of becoming a member of the Islamic Point out in Syria were being bogus when The Occasions broadcast “Caliphate” in 2018. Nevertheless, Goodale stated he was unable to declare that publicly at the time simply because the police investigation was underway.

“I had motive to suspect this specific was not what he pretended to be,” Goodale, who is no for a longer period in politics, reported in an email.

Regardless of the many holes in Chaudhry’s story, bewildering and at times contradictory intelligence studies circulated about him for decades, presenting a glimpse into the complicated challenge officials encounter in determining the countless numbers of international fighters who streamed into Syria to be part of the Islamic State.

A single Canadian formal, who was not included in the prison investigation, a short while ago described a 2017 intelligence report that reported Chaudhry — who went by the name Abu Huzayfah — experienced traveled to Syria to be part of the Islamic Condition. But the report, according to the formal, claimed that Chaudhry experienced finished little of consequence in the state and remaining not extended after he arrived.

Past that, a senior Iraqi intelligence formal recently stated that a resource had recognized Chaudhry in a photograph and called him an Islamic State combatant in Iraq and Syria who had also been imprisoned in Syria, muddying the waters even a lot more.

But right after examining the proof they collected, Canadian officers now say they are confident that Chaudhry in no way went to Syria, and they do not hope him to argue at trial that his promises of currently being an Islamic Point out executioner are even partly legitimate.

‘You just can’t just sit back’

Chaudhry moved to Canada from Pakistan with his relatives when he was considerably less than 2 many years previous, according to his uncle, and grew up in Burlington, a suburb southwest of Toronto. In a college enrollment type in Pakistan, Chaudhry said that he graduated from a Burlington high school in 2012. His father opened the household restaurant in close by Oakville.

Right after high university, Chaudhry traveled to South Africa in 2012 and enrolled in a madrasa, an Islamic school, in a town just south of Johannesburg. Pictures that Chaudhry supplied, which The Occasions lately verified as possessing been taken at the madrasa, confirmed the faculty, its dorms and him with other pupils there.

But he didn’t settle at the madrasa, in accordance to his uncle, Muhammad Usman. Chaudhry moved to Pakistan to reside with his maternal grandparents, with whom he was close. By the conclusion of 2012, he was enrolled in an environmental science study course at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Lahore, the school’s information exhibit.

He spent the next 3½ yrs residing in Lahore in a middle-course district, returning to Canada all through faculty vacations, according to his spouse and children and passport records.

“He utilised to go to college routinely,” his grandfather Shakil Ahmed told The Periods in 2018. “I applied to decide on him up and drop him at the bus stop. I made use of to obtain him from the bus quit on a bike,” he mentioned at the time. Ahmed has because died.

At the campus where Chaudhry researched, learners in both equally Western and traditional Pakistani gown mingle freely. Contrary to at one more well-known university in Lahore, the University of the Punjab, exactly where Islamist teams maintain a tight examine on male and feminine interactions, the College of Lahore’s ambiance is somewhat relaxed and relaxed.

His uncle, Usman, reported Chaudhry had demonstrated some attraction to militant tradition, but suggested it was additional function-taking part in than something serious. “He just received captivated to individuals styles because he needed to be a genuine Muslim,” he mentioned. “He utilized to get very thrilled,” he additional, by donning garments in “Taliban style.”

Chaudhry reported in the “Caliphate” podcast that the brutal civil war in Syria, which commenced in 2011, woke him to the plight of Muslims about the world and spurred him to motion. “You just can’t just sit back and, you know, watch the world burn,” he reported.

At initial, he explained to The Instances that he experienced flown to Turkey from Pakistan and crossed into Syria on foot, sneaking through a gap in a border fence to be a part of the Islamic Point out in February 2014. He explained his duties with the spiritual police drive, patrolling the streets to enforce the group’s harsh interpretation of Islam and meting out brutal punishment on neighborhood residents, often with a metallic-studded belt.

He explained he remained in Syria by way of July 2014, and was there when the Islamic State’s chief at the time, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the territory a caliphate, saying to revive the Muslim theocracy that ended with the tumble of the Ottoman Empire. Chaudhry described the celebrations within Islamic Condition-managed territory at that triumphal minute, but said he remaining Syria after that, owning grown disillusioned with the group and the killings he had been requested to carry out. So he fled, he stated, slipping again throughout the Turkish border and creating his way again to Pakistan.

But suspicions arose when The Periods, though reporting “Caliphate,” observed no stamps for Turkey in his Canadian passport and established that his Pakistani passport had prolonged expired. Records exhibit he experienced in fact flown from Lahore to Toronto in February 2014, returned to Lahore later on that identical thirty day period, and then flown back again to Toronto yet again in July 2014 — through the interval he reported he was in Syria.

Confrontation, and a adjusted story

Before “Caliphate” was broadcast, The Periods confronted Chaudhry with some of the inconsistencies in his account. He then adjusted his tale, boasting that he experienced traveled to Syria effectively after the declaration of the caliphate — someday “after September 2014,” he eventually claimed in the “Caliphate” podcast.

But even that variation of functions is identified as into issue by his university information, which recommend that he went to college that fall and surface to leave little time for him to have long gone to Syria.

The documents clearly show a middling university student who obtained into problems when he unsuccessful to pay his bus costs and who pestered the college above his biology grades. But his transcript reveals that he was awarded grades for the 2014 slide term, which ended in January 2015.

Then, weeks later on, documents show, he submitted a handwritten take note to the college in March 2015, requesting time off from his experiments his spouse and children reported he experienced had a motorcycle incident in Lahore. His Canadian passport states he left Pakistan a couple months later, and Fb posts by Chaudhry, documented by a Canadian journalist just before they had been taken down, proposed that he was again in Canada in April and Might.

Missed inconsistencies

Chaudhry told The Moments just before “Caliphate” went on the air about a person of his supposed emirs, or commanders, inside Syria. The emir experienced been the topic of an write-up in a Swedish publication.

The journalist who wrote the post served The Moments interview the emir for the “Caliphate” podcast. In the interview, the emir said he identified, with some uncertainty, Chaudhry’s face from photographs that The Periods experienced presented.

But the emir’s account challenged numerous of Chaudhry’s central assertions. The emir explained himself as a commander in a different metropolis from the one exactly where Chaudhry claimed to have been stationed. He turned down the idea that Chaudhry experienced at any time served less than him. And he claimed that Chaudhry most possible experienced a armed forces role, undercutting a principal element of Chaudhry’s tale — that he was a religious law enforcement officer, not a battlefield soldier. Some of these inconsistencies had been not involved in the “Caliphate” podcast.

Afterwards, the emir sent a quick voice message of a second Islamic State official who claimed to remember Chaudhry. The Times under no circumstances interviewed the individual specifically, however provided his assertions in “Caliphate.” And, as noted in the podcast, The Times did not independently validate the identities of these supposed officers or vet the accuracy of their accounts.

Outside of that, the “Caliphate” podcast explained the second Islamic Point out formal appeared to have inside information and facts about Chaudhry — specially, that he was Canadian — that had not been given to him in advance. But in its later on overview, The Situations located that Chaudhry’s nationality had previously been supplied to the emir throughout his job interview for the “Caliphate.” The emir then contacted the second official to see if he acknowledged Chaudhry.

When Chaudhry’s social media posts grabbed the notice of Canadian police in 2016, catching people today who had absent abroad to sign up for the Islamic Condition and charging them less than terrorism regulations was a huge priority for authorities. For the mounted law enforcement, Chaudhry’s social media postings held the promise that they could provide a scenario against a Canadian citizen.

Officers said the first techniques of the investigation utilized the digital fingerprints from Chaudhry’s trove of online exercise, journey details and other details from quite a few nations to identify if he experienced, in actuality, entered Syria as a result of Turkey or Iraq — the two most prevalent entry points for overseas fighters likely to Syria to be part of the Islamic Point out.

As the investigation ongoing, Chaudhry settled back again into his daily life in Burlington. Right before “Caliphate” aired, he instructed The Times that he had resumed his experiments at a Canadian university. But Canadian officials say their investigation located no evidence that he was a university student in Canada.

‘He’s developed a fantasy’

Police and other individuals have created makes an attempt to shake Chaudhry from his radical views. These people consist of Mubin Shaikh, regarded in Canada for his work as a paid out law enforcement informant inside of a team recognized as the Toronto 18. Its associates had plotted an elaborate wave of terror attacks in Canada.

Shaikh, who now functions as a deradicalization tutorial, said he obtained to know Chaudhry but parted ways with him for the reason that he believed that Chaudhry would not renounce his sights. He believes the tales Chaudhry told were being “fantasies.”

“He’s an ISIS supporter, a hundred p.c,” Shaikh reported, making use of an alternative name for the Islamic Condition. “So it appears like he’s produced a fantasy for himself. I can see how this takes place. You’re consuming this ISIS stuff working day in and day out. You have no everyday living, no mates, no authentic just about anything.”

But Amarasingam, the professor who has been counseling Chaudhry, rejects the thought that the younger male is an impostor. “You would have to be some sort of a sociopath to virtually invent a story like this in your head, have all the aspects in put and then inform hundreds of persons about it for months at a time, or dozens of people today, and just form of carry on like that,” Amarasingam reported. “This seems insane to me.”

He claims he stays in contact with Chaudhry and has spoken with him given that his arrest. “He was upset that his name was general public and his deal with was public, for the reason that now it’s likely to verify difficult to get a task or demonstrate hard when he’s in a romance,” Amarasingam claimed. “I assume he’s unquestionably professional-jihadist, most likely a little bit professional-ISIS, even however he’s vital of them. He nonetheless talks very nostalgically in a weird way about the individuals he realized there.”

In May well, soon after a particular nationwide protection device led by the mounted law enforcement investigated no matter whether Chaudhry experienced gone to Syria in an endeavor to be a part of or guide the Islamic State — crimes in Canada — authorities made the decision to pursue the hoax charge, officials say.

On Sept. 25, they say, police arrived at the Chaudhry family’s rented household. Minutes later on, Chaudhry was put in a automobile, in which he was informed that he was getting arrested less than a terrorism hoax part of Canada’s criminal legislation.

He was authorized to go back into his residence, without the need of any other ailments. His attorney would not explain Chaudhry’s authorized system in the case, other than to say that “he intends to vigorously defend himself.”