When Michelle Shephard, a former reporter for the Toronto Star, received an email in late 2023 from Zakaria Amara, she knew exactly who he was: one of the ringleaders for the "Toronto 18," a group of Muslim men and youth who were arrested for a 2006 terror plot to blow up a military base and buildings in downtown Toronto, and who were subjects of many Star stories. Seven of those suspects walked free, four were found guilty at trial, and the rest, including Amara, pleaded guilty. He spent almost 17 years in prison and was released on parole in 2022, but his email to Shephard led to a meeting over coffee, where she was surprised to find Amara "contrite, regretful, thoughtful, and pretty funny." "I wanted to believe he was a changed man—but was he?" Shephard writes in her profile of him for the Walrus. "The more we talked, the harder it became not to want to write about him—to write the sequel."
As Shephard kept up her correspondence with Amara, she realized he was looking for one thing: "redemption." Shephard notes his path toward that goal wasn't a straight one—long-term stints in solitary confinement seemed to just radicalize his extreme views further—but by 2014, he'd begun to doubt his beliefs. Amara began writing stories and poems for a prison publication and online, "about his upbringing (including a sexual assault in his youth), his path to radicalization, the impact of his imprisonment, and, eventually, his enlightenment." It was this writing—and reading, and talking to people with other views—that helped set him on a better path, per Shephard. As for Shephard herself, "it feels significant, nearly two decades after his arrest, to be writing a story about Amara the repentant terrorist, since I had been the first to introduce Canadians to Amara the terrorism suspect." Read the full story. (Or read other longform recaps.)
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