Ottawa police bust nets cousins of officers suing force

Ottawa police have charged the "gang-affiliated" cousins of two of their own officers who are suing the force for wiretapping them and their families, alleging the accused were at the top of one of three drug trafficking networks.

Police allege Bayle Khandid, 31, and Bile Khandid, 33, headed and ran cocaine for the ring respectively. The two brothers are listed among 17 people facing 149 criminal charges as a result of "Project Champion," an 18-month investigation targeting organized crime and narcotics networks operating in Ottawa. 

According to police sources, Bayle and Bile Khandid are the same people named in the police wiretapping lawsuit.

Chief Eric Stubbs was adamant Thursday that the results of the investigation targeting two cousins of officers suing the force in a landmark $2.5-million lawsuit — announced on the heels of a significant budget request and days before a coroner's inquest into the death of Abdirahman Abdi — was unrelated to anything but the logistics of the investigation.

"This is an independent project based on an accumulation of intelligence, evidence and information that led us to go down this path 18 months ago," Stubbs told reporters Thursday. "It's independent of absolutely everything.... There's a time where you have to act and you have to arrest, and that's exactly what we did."

In the lawsuit, filed against the force in 2023 and discovered by CBC this summer, five Somali officers allege the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) racially discriminated against them and illegally wiretapped them and their family members in 2021. No court has ruled that any of those police interceptions was unlawful.

Stubbs wouldn't discuss any potential internal fallout over the arrests, nor any impact to the investigation resulting from the knowledge that the Khandid brothers were main targets.

"We're not going to go into details about any difficulties or any turns or twists that we had in this project. That's something if anything would get revealed in a court process or a trial," he said.

Indeed, court processes have revealed some of these challenges.

Police operations targeted same individuals

Project Champion appears to have targeted some of the same individuals as 2021's "Project Game."

According to court documents previously obtained and reported on by CBC, the never publicized Project Game was focused on historical unsolved homicides, primarily two killings in 2018. 

Ottawa police announced that first project in April 2021 as a "task force" reviewing nearly two dozen unsolved homicides, just five days after securing judicial authorization to intercept the private communications of multiple targets including a man named Yasin Mohamed, now charged as a member of the Khandid ring.

During the task force investigation, police appealed to the public for help solving cold cases and highlighted only the evidentiary shortcomings in the 2018 slayings of Tarek Dakhil and Yonis Barkhadle, suggesting those were cases of interest to investigators.

No charges against Mohamed were laid in connection to the project, but his then fiancée, a judge's clerk at the time of the secret wiretap investigation in which Mohamed was a target, discovered through viewing confidential court paperwork that their private communications were being intercepted by police.

She told him, lost her job and was charged with a crime. 

According to court documents, "following the disclosure of the wiretap, the communications intercepted … largely came to an end," and the homicides remained unsolved. Still, no murder charges have been laid from either project.

Internal issues of trust 

A second and third timeline emerge from the $2.5-million lawsuit filed in 2023 by five Somali officers.

According to the statement of claim in that lawsuit, constables Liban Farah and Mohamed Islam each have cousins "involved in criminal activity who were gang-affiliated."

The two cousins were the alleged potential subjects of a historical guns and gangs "project," the lawsuit claims. Those two cousins are identified in the lawsuit as Bayle and Bile Khandid, the now-alleged leader and drug runner of one of the networks police say they dismantled.

The ties of Somali kinship are "the only conceivable basis upon which the OPS could have obtained the wiretaps and general warrants," the lawsuit alleges. "By misrepresenting the relationship of Farah and Islam to their cousins … who they had no relationship with and had not seen for years … the OPS relied on racist and stereotypical beliefs about Black men and Somali families."

The lawsuit details repeated efforts by Liban Farah to disclose his familial connections.

"When Farah first joined the Guns and Gangs unit in 2018, he immediately disclosed his connection to Bile and Bayle" to a staff sergeant. In 2020, he left the room immediately after overhearing guns and gangs officers talking specifically about a police project and the brothers.

According to the lawsuit and court documents, a homicide wiretap for Project Game was running from April 7 to June 7, 2021, the exact dates of interception cited in a letter from the Ministry of the Attorney General notifying Const. Liban Farah that he was under wiretap. 

Police can be legally authorized to intercept "primary" and "secondary" targets, but they are under no obligation to notify the targets which of the two they are. Project Game ended in September 2021. 

The lawsuit filed by the five officers subsequently lists two more time frames of interception, allegedly by Ottawa police.

One began in late April and ran for 60 days, according to a notification received by Const. Feisal Bila Houssein. The final wiretap, according to the lawsuit, ran from the end of June to the end of August and intercepted the communications of Farah, Islam, their spouses and family members, as well as the communications of Const. Abdullahi Ahmed.

Those wiretaps appear unrelated to the work of Project Game, and continue to raise questions about how many different judicial authorizations Ottawa police were granted at any one time to wiretap their own officers, and for what reasons.