Toronto 18 Mastermind Gets Life Sentence for Plotting 'al-Qaeda Inspired' Terror Attacks

Jan. 18, 2010 — -- The ringleader of the Toronto 18 terror cell that plotted to detonate truck bombs outside city landmarks and kill maximum victims, was sentenced to life in prison inside a Canadian court today, in what the judge called a "potential loss of life…never before seen in Canada."

Zakaria Amara, 24, had pleaded guilty to terrorism and bombing charges and told the court last week this his "terrorist plans were divinely aborted" as he apologized to Canadians for leading what would have been the most horrific terrorist attack in Canada's history.

"There can be no legitimate suggestion that this was not the real thing," Judge Bruce Durno said at the sentencing. "This was not a group of amateurs."

At his sentencing hearing last week, Amara said, "I have no excuses or explanations. I deserve nothing than your complete and absolute contempt."

Click here to read the letter Amara read in the courtroom.

Amara admitted masterminding the 2006 terrorist plot to blow up fertilizer bombs in U-Haul vans outside the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Toronto offices of Canada's spy agency, and an Ontario military base.

He asked an undercover informant to help him purchase ammonium nitrate – the same fertilizer used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

Amara confessed to trying to buy the chemicals needed to for the bombs, as well as researching how to build explosives, building a remote-controlled detonator and leading a terrorist training camp in Ontario. To kill the maximum number of people, Amara planned to put metal chips inside the bombs and explode them when the areas would be the busiest.

The group has since said they planned the attacks to get Canadian troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.

His attorney Michael Lacy had asked for a sentence of 18 to 20 years.

"[Amara] knows he's deserving of a very significant sentence," Lacy told ABC News. "He's not shying away from his responsibility."

Amara's sentence is the stiffest handed down to date under the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act, which was implemented after the 9/11 attacks.

He'll be eligible for parole 10 years the date of his arrest.

His attorney said Amara, who's been held in a local Toronto jail, will soon be transferred to a federal penitentiary to serve out his sentence. Amara's remorse and apologies are "unprecedented" for a leader of a terror cell, Lacy said.

After the sentencing, Amara again addressed the court to reiterate his commitment to abandoning his extremist views.

"I will use my sentence to build myself from a man of destruction to a man of construction," he said in a letter to the court.

No decision has yet been made on whether they'll file an appeal.