Bismillah [hidayahnet] 'I am not a terrorist'

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:04:07 -0800


bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful


=== News Update ===

'I am not a terrorist'

Dec. 9, 2005. 07:16 AM
MICHELLE SHEPHARD - STAFF REPORTER


 
For the past 14 months, Abdullah Khadr says he has done nothing but talk.

In Pakistan, the spies, cops and consular officials were asking the questions and recording his answers. Since his return to Toronto last Friday, it's been the lawyers.

Yesterday, Khadr came to his Toronto lawyer's office in borrowed clothes and with his mother at his side, to talk to reporters.

In the course of the interview, he revealed details about the torture he says he endured in Pakistan, the visits he had while incarcerated from several Canadian security officials and how they tried to pump him for information on others, including Maher Arar.

His story may not be simple but his message is: He's not a terrorist and it's the Canadian government that should be answering questions about his detention and alleged torture, not him.

"I just want everybody to know I have nothing to do with anything," the 24-year-old said.

He denies his family is or was ever involved with Al Qaeda. He admits he attended the notorious Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, but it was when he was 13, and it didn't have ties to terrorism.

He dismisses the claim of Western intelligence agencies that he later led the camp in the Khost Mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and instructed terrorist recruits.

"Instructed? Instruction is you have to be very, very, very, very, very inside this stuff and we didn't have that reputation in Afghanistan," he said. "I wasn't interested in that stuff. I was more interested in cars."

Abdullah Khadr's interview yesterday follows a Toronto Star story this week that revealed Khadr had been detained in Pakistan since October 2004, and returned to Toronto a free man. His whereabouts until then had been unknown. It's still unclear why he was released last week and none of the federal agencies involved in the case will comment. An official with Pakistan's Ministry of Interior said he would look into the case.

Khadr said he has no plans to launch any lawsuits and hopes to slip quietly into a typical Canadian life.

"I have no problem with anybody, why should anybody have a problem with me?" he asked.

He said he had been held since Oct. 12, 2004, when Pakistani intelligence officers picked him up in an unmarked car in Islamabad as he walked with Yousef, a friend of his father. Khadr believes Yousef was the target, and his identity was discovered only later.

Khadr alleges that during the first 48 hours of his detention he was tortured. "I was hooded. They wouldn't let us sit or sleep. Stripped, beaten. You can say sexually harassed."

He said he was threatened with sexual assault with a stick, and was beaten in the head hard enough to make his ears bleed for two weeks.

During his 14-month detention, Khadr was visited at various times by two CSIS officers from Canada, who told him their names were Mike and Bob, and another CSIS officer stationed in Pakistan. RCMP Sergeant Konrad Shourie also questioned him in Islamabad earlier this year. It's clear from court documents that the RCMP is investigating Khadr and his sister Zaynab, under terrorism legislation introduced in 2001.

If Khadr is eventually charged, his lawyer said he would argue that any information provided during these sessions would be inadmissible. "He was never brought before a court, he was never told why he was there, he was never given a lawyer ... The whole thing is such an egregious violation of human rights that it just can't be relied on in this country, we don't think," Nate Whitling said yesterday.

This issue has yet to be tested by Canadian law, but Britain's highest court ruled yesterday that information obtained under torture is inadmissible in court.

Khadr says he was questioned about various Canadians, including Maher Arar, the 35-year-old Ottawa engineer who was detained by the U.S. and then sent to Syria, where he was tortured and held for a year without charges. A federal inquiry is probing the role Canadian officials played in the case of Arar, who left Damascus in October 2003 and returned to Canada.

"To suggest Canadian authorities are still continuing to try to find evidence on Maher Arar by questioning people abroad is deeply disturbing," Arar's lawyer Lorne Waldman said yesterday. "It seems to me that interrogating (Khadr) in circumstances where he doesn't have the right to counsel or anyone else, means the Canadian government haven't learned any lessons from the Arar experience."

Abdullah Khadr is the eldest son of Egyptian-born Canadian Ahmed Said Khadr, an accused Al Qaeda financier who was killed in a battle with Pakistani forces in 2003.

Abdurahman Khadr, the second eldest son and self-proclaimed black sheep of the family, admitted in a CBC Television documentary that he was raised in an "Al Qaeda family," growing up with Osama bin Laden. He also admitted telling the Americans his brother Abdullah was a leader of the Khaldan camp, a reputed training ground in the late 1990s for Al Qaeda's most notorious members. But Abdurahman Khadr later recanted the claim, saying he only wanted to impress the Americans.

There are two other brothers in the Khadr family. Omar Khadr, 19, is Canada's only detainee at the U.S. camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and will appear before a military commission next month on charges of murder and attempted murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. army medic. The youngest son is Karim, now 16. He also lives in Toronto but is paralyzed after being shot in the battle that killed his father.

The plight of Khadr family members typically evokes little sympathy in Canada but their claims raise important questions about how the Canadian government handles security post-9/11 and the scope of our relationship with the U.S.

Lawyers for Omar Khadr have long complained that while countries such as the U.K. and Australia have publicly fought for the rights of their citizens at Guantanamo, the Canadian government has done little. It took a federal court injunction to prohibit Canadian intelligence officials from interrogating Omar while in U.S. custody.

Another court challenge, this one launched by civil rights lawyer Clay Ruby and involving Abdurahman, argues that the federal government unconstitutionally denied the 22-year-old Khadr his passport. Although the legislation dealing with passports has since been amended, at the time Khadr applied, security was not listed as grounds to refuse a passport. A federal court justice has reserved his decision.

source: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1134082213044&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News&pubid=968163964505


Related News:

'I was never in al-Qaeda,' newly freed Khadr says

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051209/KHADR09/TPNational/?query=khadr

Khadr's life here likely to be hard, sister says

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051209/KHADRREUNION09/TPNational/?query=khadr

===


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