Mail bomb trial continues; details emerge about other package sent to auto shop

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This article was published 31/10/2017 (2681 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A police bomb robot armed with water cannons wasn’t able to destroy a bubble-wrapped bomb before it exploded at a city auto shop two years ago, court heard during an accused bomber’s trial.

Guido Amsel’s attempted murder trial resumed in provincial court Tuesday with testimony from two more police officers as Amsel’s defence team continues to scrutinize police handling of evidence in the case. The 51-year-old accused is charged with five counts of attempted murder and several explosives-related offences after three explosive packages were mailed in July 2015, targetting Amsel’s ex-wife, her lawyer and Amsel’s divorce lawyer. His criminal defence lawyer, Saheel Zaman, has said Amsel is “a hundred per cent not guilty.” One of the explosive packages, mailed to Maria Mitousis’s River Avenue law office, caused an explosion that severely injured Mitousis and resulted in the loss of her right hand. She had represented Amsel’s wife, Iris, during the couple’s divorce.

A day after the River Avenue explosion, Insp. Brian Miln — then a member of the Winnipeg Police Service’s bomb unit — was responsible for navigating the robot through a Washington Avenue auto shop that had received a package addressed to Iris Amsel at her workplace. The plan was to find the white plastic bubble-wrap envelope and shoot water at it to “disrupt the circuitry” of the explosive device that was believed to be inside, he testified.

The robot’s camera was able to zoom in on the package, which had been placed atop other items in a workspace area of the shop. There were more than a dozen postage stamps affixed to the outside and a partial return address visible.

But a “tremendous amount of debris” flew into the air as the robot’s cannons fired, getting in the way of the device’s camera lens and blocking Miln’s view until it settled.

“Within minutes of taking that shot, it was apparent to me that the package had in fact functioned the way that it was designed to function, meaning that it exploded,” he said, narrating the robot’s point-of-view video footage as it was played in court Tuesday afternoon. “The water cannon wasn’t able to disrupt the circuitry inside it prior to it actually functioning.”

The robot’s camera captured pieces of metal that had blown up and stuck in the metal-clad ceiling in the blast.

The bomb robot then had to be quickly taken from the Washington Avenue explosion scene to be used in another investigation as police responded to three explosive packages delivered that same weekend.

The previous day, Miln had swabbed a pouch found on Mitousis’s desk in the aftermath of the explosion that caused her serious injuries. The pouch tested positive for triacetone triperoxide (TATP), which Miln told court is a common explosive. The handling of the pouch has been a focus of Amsel’s defence team’s questioning thus far in the trial, and Miln said it caught his attention about 3.5 hours into the bomb unit’s search of Mitousis’s office. He said he believed a dictaphone-type explosive device would have fit inside it.

“I thought, ‘this seems to be out of place,'” he said.

Miln said he remembered moving the pouch “very minimally” to swab the inside of it for testing.

“I always had two sets of gloves on,” changing them each time he handled different evidence, he said. Miln is set to continue his testimony Wednesday.

How potential evidence may have been moved around was also key during Zaman’s cross-examination of RCMP Sgt. Yvette Alarie, who took photos and video of an earlier explosion — one that blasted a crater into the outer wall of Iris Amsel’s home in Narol, Man., within the RM of St. Clements, in December 2013.

Alarie testified she photographed the outdoor explosion scene a day after it happened, arriving after a thin layer of snow had fallen and after an insurance adjuster had examined a vehicle at the centre of the scene. She said she didn’t touch any potential evidence, but testified that other officers had moved a piece of string that protruded from the damaged front end of the Jeep Cherokee for her to photograph it. Provincial court Judge Tracey Lord saw Alarie’s video of the scene as it was played in court Tuesday. It showed a broken, boarded up window to the right of the two-storey home’s front door, with blackened brick visible on the exterior wall. Investigators discovered a crater about 1.6 metres long, 39 centimetres wide and 20 centimetres deep. Alarie said they estimated the furthest-flung piece of debris landed in a neighbour’s yard 70 metres away during the blast. Court has not heard what caused the 2013 explosion.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay