AS THE DETAILS of the foiled Canadian terrorist plot continue to emerge, much is still unknown. Fifteen suspects were arrested in the Toronto area on June 2 and 3 in a police sting operation as they attempted to take possession of what they believed to be three tons of ammonium nitrate, roughly triple the amount used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Initially, many media reports said nothing about these suspects--and 2 others already in custody--beyond the fact that all are Canadian residents and most are Canadian citizens. Yet it soon emerged that the 12 adults and 5 teenagers are Muslims of Somali, Egyptian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian origin.

Media reports have named the Peace Tower in the Canadian Parliament, the CN Tower complex, and the Toronto Stock Exchange as possible targets for the plot, but what is reasonably clear is that the participants intended to inflict mass casualties. According to Luc Portelance, assistant operations director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, the suspects had "become adherents to a violent ideology inspired by al Qaeda."

Despite all the uncertainties, a number of media outlets and terrorism analysts, taking a cue from Canadian police, rushed to declare the entire affair the work of homegrown terrorists operating independently of any broader network or organization. Typical of this interpretation were the comments of former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who told ABC News following the arrests, "This is leaderless terrorism, . . . cells that are not connected to anything. . . . There's nothing in

Yet there are good reasons to doubt this view.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Canadian arrests are "part of a continuing, multinational inquiry into suspected terrorist cells in at least seven countries." Far from having completed their investigation, the Times reported, "authorities were combing through evidence seized during raids in Canada . . . to look for possible connections between 17 suspects arrested Friday and Saturday and at least 18 other Islamist militants who had been arrested in locations including the United States, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Britain, Denmark, and Sweden."

CanWest News Service reported that "the six-month RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] investigation called Project Osage is one of several overlapping probes that includes an FBI case called Operation Northern Exposure and a British probe known as Operation Mazhar." Further, the newswire noted, "the intricate web of connections between Toronto, London, Atlanta, Sarajevo, Dhaka, and elsewhere illustrates the challenge confronting counterterrorism investigators almost five years after 9/11." According to CanWest, "linking the international probes are online communications, phone calls and in particular videotapes that authorities allege show some of the targets the young extremists considered blowing up." While none of this proves an international dimension to the plot, it strongly suggests it.

And there are other hints of international connections. Canadian journalist and columnist Andrew Coyne notes that the father of terror suspect Shareef Abdelhaleen confirmed to the Canadian Press that he once posted bail for one Mohamed Mahjoub, who has been held by Canadian intelligence on the basis of secret evidence since June 2000. According to a CBC News article from September 2005, Mahjoub is accused of being a member of the Vanguards of Conquest--a faction of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group led by al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. While Mahjoub denies any connection to terrorism, he admits that he met bin Laden in Sudan in the 1990s. Perhaps the link between the Abdelhaleens and Mahjoub is just an amazing coincidence.