Byron Sonne: the thin line between terrorist and gardener

Denise Balkissoon

Fertilizer, corned beef or bomb? Potassium nitrate contains multitudes. And it’s just one of the many chemicals found inside Byron Sonne’s house during a police search after the security consultant’s pre-G20 arrest in June 2010.

After spending almost a year in pre-trial custody and sitting through a three-week hearing as to whether his Charter rights were violated during his arrest and detention, the 39-year-old’s criminal trial finally began this week. Sonne and his lawyers lost that one—on December 12, Superior Court Justice Nancy Spies ruled that although the search of Sonne’s home did violate his Charter rights, by excising the bad parts of the search warrants and amplifying the good, she could admit the evidence seized during the search into the trial proper. Sonne’s lawyers had also fought to have his interrogation by Detective Tam Bui kept out of the proceedings, but Spies decided that most of Sonne’s statements had been voluntary. She cut out some parts (mostly referring to how he used his credit cards) but largely let the interview stand.

The star witness this week was Dr. Crawford John Anderson, the head of Military Engineering for Defence Research and Development Canada. Anderson spends much of his time looking into what types of improvised explosive devices are trending on the internet, and building them himself to see if they actually work. He was here to opine as to whether the chemicals found in Sonne’s house could have been combined into a bomb.

No one disputes that Sonne had a lab in his basement, stocked with glassware and neatly labelled containers (see photos here). There was potassium permanganate, potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, iron oxide and zinc oxide. There was stearine, copper sulfate, urea, hydrogen peroxide and aluminum powder, as well as dextrin, sulfamic acid, hexachloroethane, charcoal, potassium silicate and sodium bicarbonate. Sonne had plastic bags full of wax shavings and PVC shavings, and a container of hexamine tablets next to his camp stove. There was acetone, methyl hydrate and hydrochloric acid in his garage. In his furnace room, he had an electrochemical setup where he seemed to be turning potassium chloride into potassium chlorate, a shiny white crystal that is, Anderson said, a well-known ingredient in improvised explosives like TATP (triacetone triperoxide) and HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamlene).

Most of these chemicals have multiple uses. Urea and ammonium nitrate are fertilizers, and police photographed stacks of seeds from Martha Stewart Living. “That’s the difficulty with a lot of this,” Anderson said. “It can be done with ordinary kitchen stuff.” Some have no explosive properties at all. Copper sulfate can be used to grow “beautiful blue crystals,” beakers of which were found during the search.

Anderson said that none of the chemicals had been combined—what he saw were “precursors,” not a bomb. Still, the expert was sober, pointing out that there were enough precursors in the Forest Hill home to make eight to 10 kilos of explosives, enough to “blow apart the back of a bus.”

“I haven’t seen any evidence that something explosive was made,” Anderson said. “But it’s my opinion that the materials there, the kit, not just the chemicals but the materials to put them together, I can’t see any reason other than to at some point make some sort of localized explosive.” The next day, defence lawyer Peter Copeland took Anderson through the chemical list again. Acetone is crucial to both TATP and HMTD, and Anderson agreed that he didn’t know whether the containers found in Sonne’s garage were full. But even one kilogram would be a significant explosion. The lawyer and bomb expert went through the step-by-step process of making each of the explosives up for discussion: TATP and HMTD, plus the less-powerful ANFO (which is a crude mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) and HDN (hexamine dinitrate). It would take about four hours to make 200 grams of TATP, which would then need to be dried. It would take about the same time to make 50 grams of HMTD, which would also need to be dried. Anderson agreed that Sonne had a limited amount of small glassware. Making the full London-bombing haul of explosives would take a very long time, if done by an amateur, by hand. Copeland had Anderson reiterate that none of these explosives were in the process of being made when police entered Sonne’s home three days before the G20 summit began.

In lawyerly Latin, “mens rea” means “guilty mind.” In other words, intent—the goal of the accused is a factor, which is how murder becomes manslaughter, or vice versa. Sonne says his intent was to build model rockets, and to do so within the bounds of the law. He was a member of the Canadian Association of Rocketry, and says he suspended all his experiments when the president of the association told him he needed a license to mess with stuff like potassium chlorate. Copeland and Anderson went back and forth about whether bomb-precursor chemicals are also rocket propellants. The bag of wax shavings could be used to form chemicals into a solid rocket fuel, Anderson agreed, and the drill press in the garage could be used for the same purpose. He also said, over and over, that rockets aren’t his speciality. Near the end of December 15th's testimony, Copeland posed Anderson another question. “If someone were interested in testing the system, to see whether they could raise flags with the people in authority who regulates chemicals,” the lawyer said, “could that be one reason for acquiring some chemicals in that collection?”

“It’s possible,” said Anderson. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

The trial resumes March 19.