TUNNEL TOOK MORE THAN YEAR TO BUILD

Three Surrey Men Toiled 10 Hours A Day, Six Days A Week On Passage

Three Surrey men toiled 10 hours a day, six days a week for more than
a year, using shovels to dig a cross-border drug-smuggling tunnel
that raises serious international security concerns -- including
terrorism, authorities allege.

The 110-metre tunnel, a stone's throw from the Aldergrove border
crossing, is the first ever discovered beneath the Canada-U.S.
border, and as sophisticated as some of the 34 such passageways found
beneath the Mexico-U.S. border.

"The security implications for both Canada and the United States are
immense," U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Leigh
Winchell told The Province.

"That tunnel could be used to smuggle aliens into the U.S. It could
be used to smuggle equipment into the U.S. for those who could do
harm to the United States."

Francis Raj, 30, Timothy Woo, 34, and Jonathan Valenzuela, 27, were
charged yesterday in U.S. court with conspiracy to smuggle and
distribute marijuana, an offence carrying a minimum 10-year sentence.

"This tunnel investigation clearly showed the effort by this
international drug-trafficking organization to smuggle their poison
into the United States for distribution," said U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency special agent Rod Benson.

Investigators have identified leaders of the drug-trafficking
organization in the U.S. and Canada, and located drug distribution
centres in the U.S., he said.

Raj, who bought the Aldergrove property in March 2003, has a
connection to a recent series of violent Lower Mainland kidnappings
involving Indo-Canadian suspects.

Woo had a U.S. warrant for his arrest, because police believed he had
operated as a courier for a U.S. pot-smuggling group.

All three suspects are "well-known" to police in B.C., said Insp. Pat
Fogarty of the Organized Crime Agency of B.C. "Police have tracked
these individuals over the years. The very nature of their
activities, we would consider that at the level of organized crime."

The three men launched their excavation in an Aldergrove Quonset hut
in March or April last year, Fogarty said. They allegedly shovelled
dirt into a cart, winched the cart up inside the hut and dumped the
soil into a trailer for ferrying to a landfill every two days. "They
put together a very efficient system," said Fogarty, who estimated
construction costs at $1 million.

The walls and ceiling of the 1.2-metre-wide by 1.2-m-tall tunnel were
reinforced with about 1,000 2X6 boards. It ran beneath two roads at a
depth of one to three metres.

It was the lumber going in and the dirt coming out that had tipped
off Canadian border agents, originally led to the scene during a
cocaine-smuggling probe.

Court Records

Court records in B.C. show Francis Raj was charged with possessing
drugs for trafficking in 1999, along with Randy Naicker.

Raj's charge was stayed. Naicker, fined $575 for the drug conviction,
is charged with assault in an alleged January kidnapping, which also
led to assault and weapon charges against Jethinder Narwal, 30, of Surrey.

Narwal is charged as well with a May 2 kidnapping -- linked by police
to international pot smuggling -- of an Abbotsford man in Coquitlam,
and with an April 26 abduction of an Abbotsford man in Surrey.