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Released and re-arrested

UPDATE: 3 p.m.

John Nuttall and Amanda Korody tasted freedom only fleetingly on Friday.

The couple was released from B.C. Supreme Court after terror charges against them were stayed.

But they were immediately re-arrested and taken to provincial court for a peace bond application that would mandate strict conditions for up to a year.

The Public Prosecution Service will apply for terrorism peace bonds for both of them and is reviewing whether to appeal the judge's ruling.

– with files from CTV Vancouver


UPDATE: 10:50 a.m.

Two people found guilty of terror charges will walk free after a British Columbia Supreme Court judge ruled they were entrapped by the RCMP in a police-manufactured crime.

Justice Catherine Bruce said police instigated and skillfully engineered the very terrorist acts committed by John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, who believed they were planting pressure-cooker bombs that would blow up at the legislature on Canada Day in 2013.

"The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people," Bruce said in a landmark ruling Friday.

"The defendants were the foot soldiers but the undercover officer was the leader of the group," she said.

"Without the police it would have been impossible for the defendants to carry out the pressure-cooker plan."

Bruce said RCMP officers overstepped their authority during a months-long, undercover sting and their actions were egregious.

"The police decided they had to aggressively engineer and plan for Nuttall and Korody and make them think it was their own," she said.

"To say they were unsophisticated is generous," she said, adding there was no imminent threat to the public from a pair who demonstrated they were not intelligent but naive.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge is expected to rule today on whether the RCMP coerced a Vancouver-area couple into plotting to blow up the provincial legislature on Canada Day three years ago.

Justice Catherine Bruce is to decide if an elaborate police sting that was originally launched to assess a potential homegrown terrorist threat actually manipulated its targets, John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, into breaking the law.

Nuttall and Korody were arrested on July 1, 2013, after planting what they believed were deadly pressure-cooker bombs on the grounds of the B.C. legislature.

Last year, a jury found the couple guilty of terrorism-related offences, but the judge delayed registering the convictions until lawyers could argue whether entrapment had occurred.

The defence says the pair would never have committed the acts were it not for the encouragement of undercover police officers, while the Crown says the RCMP were simply guiding Nuttall toward one of the many plans he had proposed but which would pose the lowest threat to the public.

If the court rules that entrapment occurred, a stay of proceedings will be issued and Nuttall and Korody will walk free; if the judge finds entrapment did not take place, a date will be set for a sentencing hearing.



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