A Scarborough woman convicted last week of four terrorism charges, including assaulting two people and leaving Canada to join ISIS in her native Syria, was schizophrenic and suffering from delusions before her crimes, a report stated, like reported by ottawasun.com.
A psychiatric assessment of Rehab Dughmosh, 34, which was filed as an exhibit at her sentencing hearing Monday, stated she “suffered from schizophrenia” and “exhibited prominent persecutory delusions and auditory hallucinations.”
She was paranoid, believing the Canadian government was spying upon her and Canadians were killing Muslims before she left Canada in April 2016 to join ISIS in Syria, stated Dr. Sumeeta Chatterjee, a forensic psychiatrist, in the 2018 report. Dughmosh was stopped in Turkey.
Dughmosh also swung a golf club and a butcher’s knife at two victims at a Canadian Tire store in Scarborough on June 3, 2017.
She was also convicted with carrying a weapon — a bow — for the benefit of ISIS.
“She was able to articulate an awareness of the moral wrongfulness (of her intent to join ISIS). She was generally aware of the legal and moral wrongfulness of travelling for the purpose of participating in terrorist activity,” wrote Dr. Chatterjee.
The woman showed she was aware she was breaking the law by “attempting to evade criminal persecution by denying” she wanted to travel to Syria to join ISIS, lying that she wanted to visit family, the report stated.
But the doctor wrote that as Dughmosh’s “psychosis intensified, her view of the world and associated understanding of right and wrong was increasingly distorted by the force of her symptoms.”
The psychiatrist also opined that a finding of not criminally responsible due to mental disorder was available to her “from strictly a psychiatric perspective.” But Dughmosh never pursued this defence. Crown attorney Jason Wakely disputed the facts and conclusions of the psychiatric assessment.
Although Dughmosh pleaded not guilty to the charges, she accepted the statement of facts read in court. She made no closing arguments and was found guilty of all charges after roughly an hour of deliberations.
She attacked but didn’t harm her victims, repeatedly shouting, “This is for ISIS!”
Dughmosh was arrested.
Dughmosh tried to join Daesh — the Arabic name of ISIS — in Syria by flying from Toronto to Istanbul, Turkey, where she planned to cross into ISIS-controlled territory.
Turkish authorities blocked her and flew her back to Canada.
Dughmosh will return to court Friday after the judge has reviewed the evidence.
