Sudan is your Guantanamo

Quote: Jul 23, 2009 12:23 PM Comments on this story (11) Joanna Smith Ottawa Bureau OTTAWA– A Montreal man stranded in Sudan for almost six years said he would be able to recognize the Canadian intelligence agent who interrogated him abroad. "If I saw him now I would recognize him," Abousfian Abdelrazik told a news conference in Ottawa this morning where he shared the details of the ordeal that led to his living at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum for more than a year. Abedelrazik said agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service plagued him and his family for months in Montreal before he travelled back to Sudan to visit his ailing mother in 2003. "CSIS harassed me and my family intensively," Abdelrazik said, and even offered to help his wife pay for her cancer treatments if she shared information about her husband. The harassment was one of the reasons he decided to travel back to the African country he had fled as a refugee after his wife died. He said agents visited him in Montreal and asked him where he was going. "Why do you want to find out?" he said he told them. "I have the right to go anywhere I want." He said the agents told him they knew he was going to Sudan and one said he would see him over there. While in Sudan, Abdelrazik said Sudanese officials brought him to the same CSIS agent - who he described as white with black hair but did not know his name - in October 2003. "Remember I told you in Montreal you will see? And now you will see," Abdelrazik said the CSIS official told him. Then Abdelrazik said he told him: "Sudan will be your Guantanamo." A Federal Court judge ordered Ottawa last month to return Abdelrazik from Sudan because as a Canadian citizen he had a Charter right to enter the country. Government lawyers had argued the right only applied if someone showed up at the border asking to be let in. Abdelrazik arrived in Canada in 1990 as a refugee claimant and became a Canadian citizen five years later. He was living in Montreal when he travelled back to Sudan to visit his ailing mother in 2003. He alleges Sudanese authorities tortured him during two periods of detainment. The Sudanese government released him, and both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have said they have no current or substantive information to link him to criminal activity. He is on a United Nations terrorism blacklist that restricts travel and the finances of alleged associates of Al Qaeda. Last week the UN Security Council committee that manages the list published the reasons for adding his name, although none of the allegations are new. The UN alleges he trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where he allegedly told someone he met Osama bin Laden, twice tried and failed to join Muslims fighting the Russians in Chechnya, and was an acquaintance of Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted in the U.S. for plotting an attack at the Los Angeles airport. Abdelrazik also knew Adil Charkaoui, a Morocco-born permanent resident of Canada who was arrested in May 2003 under a security certificate. His passport expired while he was in Sudan and Ottawa said repeatedly it would grant him an emergency travel document if he obtained a flight itinerary. But a few hours before he was to board an April 3 flight paid for by his supporters, the government cited the no-fly list as the reason for refusing him one. Comments on this story are moderated