After the five years of court battles and 86,000 pages of documents that made up R. v. Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a Sri Lankan-born female hip-hop artist may have the best insight on why Momin Khawaja turned his back on his polite, middle-class Canadian life to become a terrorist.

In her 2008 single Paper Planes, the U.K. rapper MIA riffs on child soldiers and scammers selling fake visas -- not about a geeky computer programmer bored with his government cubicle in downtown Ottawa.

But when she sings about the song's subversives -- the "bonafide hustler making my name" -- she could be singing about Momin Khawaja.

"No one on the corner has swagger like us/Hit me on my Burner prepaid wireless/We pack and deliver like UPS trucks/Already going hell just pumping that gas," sings the rapper, in the head of a drug runner.

That gangsta bravado was front and centre during Khawaja's four-month trial -- in his e-mails to his "bros" in Britain and Pakistan and in his online anti-West manifestos to his fiancee in Islamabad.

To the Crown, the 29-year-old Orleans man was a religious zealot who sought out like-minded extremists on the Internet so he could wage what he called "economic jihad" on the West.

Crown prosecutor David McKercher said Khawaja had chosen "a murderous way of life" and asked Justice Douglas Rutherford to throw the book at him, looking for two life sentences and up to 58 additional years.

Defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon acknowledged his client wanted to be a jihadi soldier but argued he was only a bit player in a clandestine operation.

In yesterday's sentencing decision, Rutherford walked a line that pleased no one.

He ignored the Crown's call for a life sentence and rejected the defence's call to allow Khawaja to walk away a free man.

An observer had to sympathize with the judge, who noted yesterday he didn't have much to work with on the "who is Momin Khawaja" angle.

Rutherford wanted to assess Khawaja's "maturity, character, behaviour, attitude and willingness to make amends" for a pre-sentence report.

Hard thing to do, the judge told the court, when the convicted terrorist, along with his parents, refused to be interviewed by a probation officer and when "not guilty" were among the few words the Orleans man uttered during the trial.

Somewhere between the yawning chasm of the murderous zealot and the naive jihadi lies the real Momin Khawaja.

During the 28 trial days, Khawaja sat in a Sphinx-like silence, flanked by two armed RCMP tactical officers.

He gave only a brief smile and a quick wave to his parents on the first day of the trial.

The photos and court sketches will show the serious, skulking Khawaja. The stories will talk about his Hi-Fi Digimonster, the homemade remote-control detonator and the 30 replicas he promised to make for his leaders to blow up fertilizer bombs.

SWAGGER

But for all his swagger with his "bros" at the terror training camp in Pakistan and gung-ho jihad talk, there's a strange and almost gentle side to Khawaja that emerged during the trial.

The love letters between him and Zeba Khan, a U.S.-born Pakistani woman he met online, showed Khawaja as at turns funny, thoughtful and conflicted.

In late 2003, he and Khan had planned to get married but Khawaja unceremoniously broke it off by pledging his devotion to jihad, "the J."

He asks Khan "to forgive me for anything and everything" for breaking off the engagement.

Five weeks later, he e-mails her, sheepishly inquiring if he could have another chance. Khan never replies.

It appears even terrorists can be knobs.

DONNA.CASEY@SUNMEDIA.CA