It was a covert mission designed to secretly help police find a terrorist except it kept most of the residents of Kingston, Ontario up at night for weeks. Finally, on Friday, the RCMP got their man when they charged a Kingston teenager with terrorism and said he’d started building a bomb. A 20-year-old man was also arrested but has not been charged. Police allege the teenager, who can’t be named, was trying to convince others to plant the bomb. “The act didn’t take place. We disrupted the act,” RCMP Supt. Peter Lambertucci said Friday.
In gathering their evidence, the RCMP also disrupted the slumber of thousands of Kingston resident by flying racetrack patterns over the city in the early morning hours in a Pilatus PC-12 Spectre surveillance aircraft. Although the turboprop single would be difficult to identify in a battlefield environment, its characteristic engine and prop sound was like an itch Kingston residents couldn’t scratch for almost a month. Pretty much everyone in town had figured out it was a spy plane of some sort and it’s not clear what role it might have played in assembling the evidence needed for an arrest.