Via National Post:
In the video he shot inside his hut in the mountains of Dagestan last winter, William Plotnikov narrated as he panned from the black flag of jihad to three bearded rebels and their assault rifles.
Then he turned the camera on himself.
“I ask Allah that the next season he’ll give us the opportunity to kill as many kafirs [non-believers] as we can, just to shred them to pieces,” William said. “Allah is almighty.”
Watching the clip on the computer in his apartment north of Toronto last week, Vitaly Plotnikov looked both heartbroken and perplexed. It was hard for him to accept that this was his son.
“It’s just like a different person to me,” he said.
Russian security forces announced last month that they had killed William, a 23-year-old Canadian, during a gun battle in Dagestan. Since then, the Canadian government has been trying to verify the Russians’ account.
But in an interview with the National Post, Mr. Plotnikov confirmed William’s death and spoke for the first time about his son’s rapid transformation from Toronto teenager and champion boxer to Muslim convert and jihadist fighter.
What seemed to amaze Mr. Plotnikov most was how fast it all happened. His son only became interested in Islam in 2009, he said. Within a year, he had left Canada and by July he was dead. He had gone from convert to martyr in less than three years.
He is not the first radicalized Canadian to die under such circumstances, but he is believed to be the first Canadian convert to die fighting in the name of jihad— all the others having been born into their faith. His father said William became so radicalized he did not even consider the other Muslims he met to be true Muslims. He claimed that Canada and the U.S. were a source of evil for Muslims.