JANE ARMSTRONG
VANCOUVER — From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
More traces of explosives have been found on the migrant ship that brought 76 Sri Lankan Tamil men to Canada last month, a Canada Border Services Agency officer has testified.
The explosive RDX - also known as cyclonite or hexogen - is used to make plastic explosives, mainly for the military. Its residue was discovered in three separate parts of the Princess Easwary, which was intercepted off the coast of Vancouver Island on Oct. 17.
Traces of two other explosives were found on two items of clothing seized when Canadian authorities boarded the ship and took the migrants into custody.
This latest revelation - made at a detention hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board - is potentially damaging to the migrants.
All of the migrants claim to be Tamil refugees fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka. All told, border officers who scoured and swabbed the ship came up with 10 positive results for traces of explosives.
Some terrorism experts - including a scholar who is the main adviser to the Canadian government in the case - have alleged that at least two of the men are members of the Tamil Tigers, the military arm of a violent separatist group that waged a decades-long war with the Sri Lankan government. There have also been allegations that the migrants' ship was previously a Tamil Tiger gun-running vessel that transported weapons from North Korea to Sri Lanka.
But the lawyer for more than 20 of the Tamil migrants said the positive tests for explosives traces mean little. If anything, the fact that the amounts found are relatively small undermines the argument that this was a gun-running ship. If it truly was used to transport weapons and explosives, far more residue would have been detected, Lorne Waldman said in an interview after the hearing.
"They are claiming this is a weapons smuggling ship," he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. "They are talking about microscopic traces of explosives. ... It's not plausible that a ship that was dedicated to smuggling weapons" produced so few positive results.
Mr. Waldman said it would not be unusual to find traces of explosives - some of which were found on the migrants' clothing - if the men had been near conflict zones. The lawyer yesterday put that scenario to CBSA officer Chantal Lee, who analyzed swabs from the ship.
But Ms. Lee said she couldn't answer that. "All I know is that I took the samples and the results were positive," she testified.
Lawyers for the migrants have cross-examined three witnesses who have provided testimony for Canadian authorities in their attempts to determine if the migrants are terrorists or genuine refugees.
Last week, Mr. Waldman grilled Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert who has been the chief adviser to Canadian authorities probing the migrants' identities and backgrounds.
Yesterday, Mr. Waldman questioned Ms. Lee, who tested dozens of swabs taken from the ship. She said she discovered "three hits" of the explosive RDX in swabs taken from different parts of the ship.
Later, more samples that were sent to Ottawa for testing yielded five positive results for the explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, she said. PETN is also used in heart medication.
The latest revelations about the RDX discovery brings to 10 the number of positive test results for explosive residue found on the Princess Easwary. Earlier, CBSA officers found trace amounts of TNT and PETN on two items of clothing seized from the ship.
It's been more than a month since the migrant ship sailed into Canadian waters off Vancouver Island. Today, all but one of the 76 men remain behind bars as border officials attempt to establish their identities.
In other testimony, a border intelligence officer said he learned that the migrant ship was headed to Canadian waters two days before it arrived. Russ MacNeil testified that ships of that size are required to notify a country's coast guard 96 hours before arriving. When the ship failed to declare itself, a federal fisheries airplane was sent to observe it. From aerial photos, border officials were able to glean that the ship was called Ocean Lady. This later proved to be a fake name and its real name was the Princess Easwary.
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