A woman reporter runs with a rebel fighter to avoid snipers at the frontline against Daesh fighters in Aleppo's northern countryside, October 10, 2014. REUTERS/Jalal Al-Mamo/Files

 

MONTREAL: A young Montreal couple tried to use Christmas lights and sandpaper to make a homemade bomb, a prosecutor told a Canadian court on Wednesday in opening statements in the terrorism trial of the former college students.

The items and a handwritten recipe to make a bomb were found after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched a condo rented by El Mahdi Jamali and Sabrine Djermane in 2015, prosecutor Lyne Decarie said in Quebec Superior Court in Montreal.

It?s not clear how the lights would have been used to make a bomb.

The then-teenage couple?s 2015 arrest came at a time when international security forces reported that waves of young people ? including college students from Montreal ? were heading to Syria to join Daesh extremists.

Jamali, 20, and Djermane, 21, have pleaded not guilty to charges of trying to leave Canada to join a terrorist group, possessing an explosive substance, facilitating a terrorist activity, and committing an offence for a terrorist group.

The pair reiterated their not-guilty pleas before Decarie began her remarks and then listened from a high-security prisoners? box that was enclosed in thick glass.

The prosecutor said she would call family and friends of the accused as well as police experts in terrorism and explosives as witnesses in the trial, which is expected to last 10 weeks.