OTTAWA - “Are you down with the ‘J’?”

The question was contained in one of hundreds of e-mail exchanges that will be used as evidence in the terror trial against Momin Khawaja, in whose world - if the case against him is to be believed -  ‘J’ stood for Jihad.

In his two-hour opening statement Monday, Crown attorney David McKercher walked Ontario Superior Court Judge Douglas Rutherford through an exhaustive outline of the multi-faceted case against Khawaja, the 29-year-old software developer who pleaded not guilty to seven terrorism-related criminal charges.

McKercher offered a blizzard of names and aliases - names such as Big Dawg, Fat Git and Kash - that prompted Rutherford to later plead for a cast of characters so he could better follow the case.

The opening day was also marked by unprecedented security and the surprise appearance of the Crown’s star witness, Mohammed Junaid Babar.

Yet it was the e-mail exchanges read by McKercher - a mix of murderous jihad and streetwise hip-hop - that seemed so curious, so culturally confused.

“How’s it’s goin’ niggas, everything OK?” Omar Khyam, a contact in London, England wrote to Khawaja in one e-mail to be entered into evidence.

“Yeah, bro, got home safe. How bout you niggas? Everything cool?” Khawaja responded.

The men were using what McKercher described as an e-mail “drop box” that meant their messages were never actually sent. Instead, the men shared an e-mail address - puretropicana<P>yahoo.com - and a sign-on that allowed them to read each other’s draft emails.

Their ingenious method and ghetto language were meant to disguise what the Crown insists was a plot to detonate a 600-kilogram fertilizer bomb somewhere in Britain, either in a London nightclub or a Kent shopping mall or outside a U.K. power plant.

If the bomb went off in a crowded area, McKercher said, the “result would be massive destruction and loss of life.”

The case against Khawaja, which has yet to be proven, will stretch for months.

Outside court, Khawaja’s lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, called the evidence to be introduced by the Crown’s witness Babar mostly hearsay and said the prosecution’s case is largely a rehash of the London trial that saw five men convicted for their part in the fertilizer bomb plot.

McKercher, however, told court the RCMP, when it raided Khawaja’s Ottawa home on March 29, 2004, recovered a computer with, among other things, a JPEG file labelled, ‘Hi-Fi Digimonster.’ The Digimonster was a bomb detonation device that could trigger an explosion using radiowaves.

Khawaja had travelled to London in February, 2004 to show pictures of the Digimonster to his UK co-conspirators, McKercher told court.

Also found in Khawaja’s home was the Digimonster itself, which the RCMP later confirmed as a working model, the Crown said. Three guns and a cache of ammunition were also recovered along with Khawaja’s jihadist library, which included works such as The Martyrs of Bosnia, The Art of War, Mao ZeDong’s Guerrilla Warfare and Decisive Battles of Islam.

Under the mattress belonging to his brother, Qasim, police recovered $10,000 in $100 bills.

The money, McKercher said, was earmarked for supplies to be bought for overseas jihadists.

Besides the surveillance photographs, e-mail exchanges, and physical evidence retrieved from his home, Khawaja also faces testimony from an al-Qaida turncoat, Mohammad Junaid Babar, who took the witness stand Monday afternoon.

Babar, who entered in handcuffs, told court that he decided to fight in Afghanistan after watching planes slam into the World Trade Centre on Sept. 11, 2001 - even though his mother was working in one of the towers at the time of the attack. His mother was not injured.

Seven or eight days after the attack, Babar told court, he left New York for Pakistan, where he would eventually fall into extremist circles. His testimony, which is expected to tie Khawaja to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, is scheduled to last several days.

Babar’s unexpected appearance as the trial’s first witness heightened security concerns.

Indeed, the trial opened under the tightest security ever seen in an Ottawa courtroom.

Courtroom 37 was transformed was cordoned off by a floor-to-ceiling wire fence. All spectators had to pass through a metal detector, then pass by heavily armed tactical unit officers as they entered court.

Before the Monday afternoon session, when Babar took the witness stand, some spectators were made to remove their shoes and put them through an X-ray machine.

Inside court, four members of Ottawa’s tactical unit were deployed, two of them flanking Khawaja in the prisoner’s box, which was protected by high glass.

Khawaja remained implacable throughout the day’s proceedings. 

Dressed in a charcoal grey suit, with his hair slicked back behind his ears, he maintained a clear, steady voice as he announced his not guilty pleas to the seven charges against him, which include allegations he participated in a terrorist group, used explosives for the commission of a terrorist act, facilitated terrorist activity, financed terrorism and offered instruction to a terrorist group.

Khawaja kept his eyes forward during the plea and did not seek out his parents from among the crowd of 70 spectators who watched Monday’s proceedings.

He rarely raised his eyes from the ground as the studious-looking Babar began to testify about his own embrace of what he called “the J.”