[JURIST] The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) [official website] said Monday that there may be more arrests in the terror investigation that led Friday to the detention and charging of 12 men and five youths [JURIST report] suspected of being members of a terrorist cell that planned to attack targets in southern Ontario and Toronto, including - according to Monday's Globe and Mail - the CN Tower [tower website] and the Peace Tower [Wikipedia backgrounder] on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The 17, also suspected of attending a terror training camp near Toronto, allegedly gathered three tons of common makeshift bomb ingredient ammonium nitrate fertilizer, three times the amount used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. The suspects have been charged under the terrorism provisions of Section 83 [text] of the Canadian Criminal Code. The Toronto Star has reported that the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service [official website] began its investigation by watching an internet chatroom on 2004 after users made anti-Western comments, and soon after contacted the RCMP for a criminal investigation. CTV has more.

In a related development, vandals in Toronto broke nearly 30 windows of a mosque [news release, PDF] over the weekend and damaged cars in the vicinity, shortly after Canadian authorities announced the terror arrests. Canadian officials have no information indicating that the attack on the Toronto mosque was directly related to the arrests, but president of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto [advocacy website] Mohammad Alam nonetheless expressed fear that the mosque attack might be the beginning of religously motivated attacks against Canada's 600,000 Muslims. Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair has nonetheless insisted that if the mosque attack was religiously motivated, it "will not be tolerated in our community." Reuters has more. Canadian Press has local coverage.