The young resident of a suburb south of Montreal has not been charged with any crime. He travelled to Turkey for several months in 2012 and 2013, but there is no proof that he crossed the border into Syria. 
 
 La Presse has chosen not to name the suspect, because it is not possible at this stage in the investigation to confirm his level of involvement in events that occurred in Syria. 
 
 Despite this, he was able to get close enough to Trudeau for long enough to take a selfie with the prime minister. 
 
 What’s different is that the man posing beside Justin Trudeau is not just an average voter. He is the subject of an RCMP investigation, suspected of having participated along with other Quebecers in the kidnapping of two American journalists in Syria in 2013, an incident believed to have been orchestrated by the al-Nusra Front, a group linked to Al Qaeda. 
 
 At first glance, nothing stands out about the picture. A photograph like the thousands of others seen on social media, showing the prime minister smiling in the company of a voter. 
 
 But the simple fact that a person who is the subject of a terrorism investigation could find himself so close to Trudeau raises numerous questions, not only about the security of the prime minister but the level of surveillance placed on those Canadians suspected of having waged jihad in Syria. 
 
 He has started a family. He goes to school. He has publicly denounced extremist ideas. Everything indicates that he had no malicious intent when he took a selfie with the prime minister, someone he regularly praises on his Facebook page. It was just chance that he crossed paths with Trudeau. 
 
 Two sources with knowledge of the case, but who are not authorized to speak publicly, said the man no longer follows radical Islamist ideology since his return to Canada, and that his reintegration has been a success story. 
 
 “We have a prime minister who is very open. But a guy like this should not have been able to get so close. I don’t want to blame the work that was done, but it shows that there is no surveillance on this individual, that the people around the prime minister were not warned,” said Paul Laurier, a former terrorism investigator with the Sûreté du Québec, who has also worked with the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team. 
 
 Laurier said that in addition to bodyguards who assure Trudeau’s physical protection, there is a team of police officers specializing in intelligence who study potential threats faced by Trudeau. 
 
 The allegations against the man in the photo are serious. In June 2015, two years after his return from Turkey, the RCMP executed a search warrant at his parents’ home while investigating the kidnapping of two American journalists, Matthew Schrier and Theo Padnos. 
 
 The two men were held captive in Syria — one for seven months, the other for two years. Officially, the suspect was in Turkey, near the Syrian border, during part of the time they were in captivity. In the search warrant applications that are signed by a justice of the peace, the police said they believed the Quebecer committed several terrorist infractions, including having participated in the kidnapping, extortion and fraud for the profit of a terrorist group. 
 
 The accusations have not been tested before the courts. 
 
 According to sources, the suspect’s name is on an American no-fly list. He had great difficulty returning to Canada in 2013 because of this. Before departing for Turkey, he trained at a firing range and showed signs of radical behaviour. 
 
 Despite this, on Dec. 18, 2015, just six months after the search warrant at his parents’ home, he posted the picture of the selfie with Trudeau. 
 
 That day, the recently elected prime minister was giving an interview to Radio-Canada television host Patrice Roy to talk about his first months in power. The interview was conducted at a Montreal subway station, Place-des-Arts, where the Liberal leader responded to impromptu questions from the public. 
 
 At the end of the interview, Roy took Trudeau up to the street level. That’s where the young man bumped into the politician, who was surrounded by his bodyguards as he posed for selfies with people passing by. 
 
 He was accompanied by another suspect in the alleged kidnapping as well as the man’s wife. The couple do not appear to have been photographed with the politician. 
 
 In a video of the interview broadcast by Radio-Canada, the man can be seen walking in the crowd and attempting to approach Trudeau. Once the interview was finished he took his photograph and left. He was not bothered by the authorities on site. No one attempted to block him. 
 
 It was only several days later, after having published the picture on his Facebook page, that he was visited by the RCMP. 
 
 Sources said the investigators wanted to know why he was spotted in the company of the prime minister. 
 
 Contacted by La Presse, the RCMP refused to respond to questions, indicating that they “touch on ongoing investigations.” 
 
 The Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment on the incident, referring questions to the RCMP. ||||| The worries about a suspect in a terror investigation seen posing for a selfie last year with the prime minister go far beyond the anxiety of how he got that close. 
 
 A joint CBC News/Radio-Canada investigation has learned that the man is one of at least four Quebec men of interest to the RCMP for their alleged connection to the 2012 kidnappings of two Americans in Syria. 
 
 The man in the selfie, in his mid-20s, is believed to be on a U.S. no-fly list. His home was raided by police as part of a terror investigation a few months before Dec. 18, 2015, when the selfie was taken. The man was part of a crowd of people who took turns posing with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau following a Radio-Canada interview in Montreal. 
 
 Police have interviewed others in the group and seized electronics and Canadian passports held by some of them. 
 
 None of them has been charged with a crime, and CBC is not identifying them. 
 
 Men were at Montreal firing range 
 
 CBC has been in contact with two of the men, who are going about their lives in Quebec. Sources have indicated that the other two may be overseas, possibly in Syria or Turkey. 
 
 CBC has repeatedly asked CSIS and the RCMP about the travels and status of the men. Both agencies have declined to provide details. 
 
 The questions keep piling up about just what they may have done or may still be doing. 
 
 The names of the men in the group appear repeatedly in logs from a Montreal rifle range. While the RCMP has seized some of the logs, CBC has obtained others. They show repeated entries from up to nine men, in 2012, in the months just before a few of them were thought to have left for Syria, including the man in the selfie. 
 
 The men appear to all be there at the invitation of another Montreal man known to police. 
 
 Kidnappers believed to be Canadian 
 
 If it all sounds tangled, that's because it is. 
 
 The kidnappings in Syria, of Americans Matt Schrier and Theo Padnos, especially so. 
 
 Schrier, a journalist, had been taking photos of the deadly conflict in Syria and was finally heading back to the United States on New Year's Eve 2012. 
 
 That's when his taxi was ambushed near the border with Turkey. It was men from the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra who had taken him. 
 
 Canadian links to kidnapping of Matthew Schrier in Syria1:00 
 
 For the next seven months — until he managed to escape — he was beaten and tortured and moved from one makeshift jail to another. 
 
 In the winter of 2013 there was a series of strange encounters. Three masked, armed men repeatedly interrogated him and squeezed him for banking and email passwords. 
 
 He didn't know it at the time, but those interrogators were using that information to rack up thousands of dollars in purchases on Schrier's accounts. 
 
 Those interrogators, Schrier and fellow captive Theo Padnos were certain, were Canadian. 
 
 The accents gave them away. 
 
 Accents give Canadian captors away0:56 
 
 "Theo knew where they were from," Schrier told CBC News in an interview last year. "Theo grew up in Vermont, right on the border, and he knew. As soon as he came back he was like, 'They're Canadians,' so I was like, yeah, right. He's like, 'No, they're Canadians … I know they're Canadians.' And he was right." 
 
 Receipts bore Montreal address 
 
 Nearly a year later, back safely at home, Schrier began going through his old emails. That's when he found the receipts for those goods bought while he was still a captive: tablet computers, boots, car parts, camera equipment. He got in touch with CBC News right away because some of those receipts showed purchases shipped to an address in Montreal. 
 
 That address is where the man in the selfie lived. 
 
 The receipt was made out to the man's roommate, who is one of the men of concern to police in connection with the kidnappings. 
 
 Logs from a Montreal firing range, above, show that some of the men of interest to the RCMP had been there on several occasions in the spring of 2012. Names have been blurred to protect privacy. (CBC/Radio-Canada) 
 
 Last year, CBC went to find the man named in the receipt and caught up with him. He wasn't alone: the selfie-taker was with him. 
 
 The exchange was brief; neither man wanted to talk. The man from the selfie left relatively soon after the camera appeared. 
 
 There was a fast-walking, fast-talking conversation with the other man, who was trying to hide his face and dismissed questions about Schrier and about the receipts bearing his name. 
 
 Canadians siphoned thousands of dollars from accounts3:29 
 
 This all exhausts and infuriates Schrier. 
 
 "I would like the Canadian authorities to prove they aren't on the leash of the FBI. Go do something," he told CBC with no small measure of anger. 
 
 Schrier is a man who saved his own life. And he says he feels like he has had to conduct his own investigation. The abandonment he felt in Syria matched, perhaps, by a feeling of abandonment back at home. 
 
 What he wants is justice. If his kidnappers are among the Canadians in this group, he wants them to be held accountable. And he cannot fathom why, with the evidence he has of at least a tangential connection to his kidnapping, arrests have not been made. 
 
 If that isn't a disturbing enough tale for the Canadian authorities, perhaps seeing the selfie with the prime minister is. ||||| Related 
 
 Opposition MPs are chastising Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his decision to take on Fox News over an inaccurate tweet about the Quebec City mosque shooter. 
 
 Saying the tweet “dishonoured the memory of the six victims,” Trudeau’s office on Tuesday asked Fox to retract or update the post, which described the alleged shooter as being of Moroccan origin. 
 
 Just before 8 p.m. Tuesday, Fox deleted the tweet and apologized. 
 
 On Wednesday, opposition MPs said the prime minister should have better things to do. 
 
 “We’ve got jobs leaving the country, we have had a terrible tragedy in Quebec City,” said Lisa Raitt, a Conservative MP and party leadership candidate. “So why do you pick fights with the American news media?” 
 
 Rhéal Fortin, interim leader of the Bloc Québécois, said Trudeau’s office should stop conducting “spontaneous, instant” diplomacy via Twitter. 
 
 “I want serious discussions that are conducted rigorously,” he said. 
 
 But Trudeau stood by the decision to complain to Fox. 
 
 “I think it’s important to emphasize what actually happened in Quebec City and think about lessons we need to learn from it,” he told reporters in Ottawa. 
 
 In the minutes after the shooting Sunday night, police arrested two men — a Moroccan-born Quebecer and a Quebec-born man. But at noon Monday, police announced the Moroccan-born man was actually a witness. The other man — Alexandre Bissonnette — has been charged with murder and attempted murder. 
 
 At 12:31 p.m. on Monday, Fox News tweeted: “Suspect in Quebec mosque terror attack was of Moroccan origin, reports show.” 
 
 Kate Purchase, Trudeau’s director of communications, wrote to Fox News, demanding that the tweet be taken down or corrected. 
 
 “Canada is an open, welcoming country that stands by its citizens,” Purchase said in her letter. 
 
 “We are a nation of millions of immigrants and refugees, of hundreds of cultures, languages, and religions bound by one, unwavering, unshakable belief: we are stronger not in spite of our differences, but because of them. 
 
 “These tweets by Fox News dishonour the memory of the six victims and their families by spreading misinformation, playing identity politics, and perpetuating fear and division within our communities.” 
 
 Purchase went on to note that “Muslims are predominantly the greatest victims of terrorist acts around the world. To paint terrorists with a broad brush that extends to all Muslims is not just ignorant — it is irresponsible. 
 
 “If we allow individuals and organizations to succeed by scaring people, we do not actually end up any safer. Fear does not make us safer. It makes us weaker. Ramping up fear and closing our borders is not a solution. It distracts from the real issues that affect people’s day-to-day life.” 
 
 In a statement sent to the National Post, Refet Kaplan, the managing director of FoxNews.com, said: “FoxNews.com initially corrected the misreported information with a tweet and an update to the story on Monday. The earlier tweets have now been deleted. We regret the error.” 
 
 Thank you @FoxNews for deleting the tweet. We appreciate it. — Kate Purchase (@katepurchase) February 1, 2017 
 
 The second man arrested on Sunday night spoke out after police released him. 
 
 Mohamed Belkhadir, a 29-year-old Moroccan-born engineering student, told reporters he was trying to help shooting victims when police mistook him for a suspect. 
 
 Belkhadir, who had called 911 after hearing 15 to 20 seconds of gunfire, said he fled when he saw someone with a firearm. He thought it was the shooter; in fact, it was a police officer. 
 
 He doesn’t hold it against police, saying he understands why he was arrested and that officers treated him well. 
 
 The Canadian Press contributed to this report 
 
 ariga@postmedia.com 
 
 twitter.com/andyriga
– Justin Trudeau has posed for countless selfies in the 11 months since he became Canada's prime minister—including one with a man security experts say shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near him. A man who appears in a selfie with Trudeau taken in Montreal last December is being investigated by the Mounties amid accusations he was part of a group that kidnapped an American journalist in Syria in 2013, report La Presse and the Toronto Star. The man, who allegedly joined with the al-Qaeda-affilated Nusra Front, is believed to be on a US no-fly list and his home was raided a few months before the Trudeau photo, reports the CBC. The man has not been charged with any crime and sources say he publicly renounced radical Islam after returning to Canada in late 2013. Still, analysts say the selfie raises serious questions about both Trudeau's security and the monitoring of terror suspects. "We have a prime minister who is very open. But a guy like this should not have been able to get so close," former terrorism investigator Paul Laurier tells La Presse. "I don’t want to blame the work that was done, but it shows that there is no surveillance on this individual, that the people around the prime minister were not warned."