Postal worker says suspect package didn’t look unusual

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This article was published 07/11/2017 (2674 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A letter carrier who told police he believed he unwittingly delivered a bomb to a Winnipeg law office has testified he didn’t notice anything unusual about the package until after news spread of an explosion.

“It was just a standard delivery package,” Canada Post employee James Watson testified Tuesday during the attempted-murder trial for Guido Amsel.

Amsel, 51, is accused of mailing bombs to his ex-wife and lawyers who had worked on the couple’s divorce file.

The Petersen King law office at 252 River Ave. was along Watson’s regular delivery route in July 2015. He said he remembered delivering a package there July 2, one day before an explosion seriously injured lawyer Maria Mitousis, who lost her right hand in the blast.

Watson said he specifically remembered the package’s address label was handwritten, and the white plastic bubble mailer had something “hard” inside. He said he would’ve either handed the mail to the law office receptionist, if she was there, or placed it on the front desk.

Watson said he didn’t think anything of it until after he got home from work the next day. He wasn’t able to deliver all of his mail July 3, 2015, because police had cordoned off the block surrounding the law office, and Watson said he didn’t find out why until he tuned in to the TV news that evening.

“I heard that possibly a bomb had went off at 252 River. And as soon as I thought about it, I remembered that I delivered a package the previous day, and it just occurred to me that, more than likely, I was the one that had delivered it,” he said.

Watson said he phoned his supervisor at Canada Post, and asked them to trace all of the packages he’d scanned as out for delivery that day.

Steven Riesz, a postal inspector for Canada Post’s Prairie region securities branch, testified Tuesday there were no traceable packages delivered to 252 River Ave. on July 2, 2015. If a package had been dropped into a Canada Post mailbox, rather than being mailed at a post office, it wouldn’t have a traceable bar code attached, he said.

Potentially dozens of postal workers may have come into contact with the explosive package while it was being processed and sorted in a bin at the depot, Riesz said. Four or five employees may have handled that individual package before it was delivered, he said.

“I would say nothing less than three (employees),” he said during cross-examination from defence lawyer Saheel Zaman.

Riesz said Canada Post employees are trained to keep an eye out for suspicious packages, signs of which include over-postage — Winnipeg police who saw the explosive packages that were delivered in July 2015 testified they had more than a dozen stamps.

Other red flags are packages that are heavily taped, have oily stains, have no return address or a fake one, have a tapered thickness, and are personally endorsed or marked confidential, Riesz said.

He told court Canada Post processes 8.5 billion pieces of mail per year, and couldn’t estimate how many of those may be suspicious.

Amsel has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. His provincial court trial is set to wrap up in mid-December.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay