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| Great White North |
| Khadr denies al-Qaeda membership |
| 2005-12-11 |
| In his young life, Abdullah Khadr has been labelled a fugitive, a suicide bomber, even a terrorist-training-camp instructor. Yet he insists that the reality is far less interesting. "I was never in al-Qaeda," the unassuming 24-year-old said yesterday in his first remarks since returning to Canada last week. "I have no problem with anybody," he said in halting English. "Why should anybody have a problem with me?" One of several Arab-Canadian siblings raised in Afghanistan by notoriously fundamentalist parents, Khadr describes himself as an aspiring businessman who is walking around in borrowed clothes until he can put his life back together. He quietly returned to Toronto under RCMP escort last Friday after spending the past 14 months in Pakistani jails. The Khadr family first came to Canadians' attention when the patriarch, Ahmed Said Khadr, was arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of being involved in a deadly 1995 bombing. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the elder Mr. Khadr was killed and each of his four sons was separately jailed and accused of links to terrorism. The only one still in prison is Omar, accused of killing a U.S. soldier. Most of the family is now in Canada, but the fate of Abdullah Khadr was unknown until this week. Mr. Khadr was accompanied by his mother, Maha Elsamnah, for an interview yesterday at a Toronto lawyer's office. He said he had explanations for most of what's been reported about him. He also accused Canadian and U.S. agents of turning a blind eye to the conditions of his imprisonment. Western agents who came to question him when he was in prison knew his Pakistani jailers abused him, he said, but were more concerned with asking him about top al-Qaeda figures and certain Canadian Muslims. He said he was beaten and threatened during the early phases of his 2004 arrest. "It is torture," he said. "They [the Pakistanis] have a big stick and they said, 'We'll put it inside you.' " Mr. Khadr says RCMP, CSIS and CIA agents questioned him several times in Pakistan, and he suggested they knew of the abuse. The Canadian government won't comment on his story. Mr. Khadr says he was asked about Canadian Muslims who were also arrested overseas in recent years, including Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad El-Maati, all detained in Syria. He also says he was asked about Aly Hindy, the controversial Scarborough imam who has complained Canada's spy service is targeting him. Mostly, however, agents were interested in the Khadr family's relationship to al-Qaeda figures. The elder Mr. Khadr moved his children from Canada to Afghanistan in the 1980s so they could be reared in an Islamic state. Family members say they were there to do charity work for war orphans. "We were close to Osama bin Laden, but living in a different compound," said Mr. Khadr. "I don't know if my father did any military work. I never saw it. I never heard." His family fled Afghanistan for Pakistan after the 2001 U.S. invasion. Unlike his brothers, Abdullah Khadr was not arrested until late 2004. In public remarks, Khadr family members have been inconsistent on whether they attended training camps. Mr. Khadr's brother Abdurahman has said that, when he was imprisoned by the Americans, he made up the story that Abdullah was a terrorist trainer in the hope they would let him go. Abdullah Khadr would only say yesterday that he's "not friendly" with his brother at the moment. "Instructors have to be very, very, very, very, very inside [al-Qaeda]," he said, insisting that he spent only about two weeks at the infamous Khalden training camp when he was about 13 years old. He said he always cared more about mechanics than violent jihad. "I wasn't interested in that stuff. I was more interested in cars." Mr. Khadr says that he was nowhere near when his father was killed in a battle in 2003; that he lived openly in Islamabad for almost a year after that. He said he was with one of his father's friends "drinking juice" when Pakistani agents arrested him. In the initial days after his arrest, he said, he was hooded, beaten and not allowed to sleep. He said his Pakistani captors never made good on the threat to rape him with a stick, but came close. An agent with an American accent told him that "whatever you saw here was nothing, compared to what we can do if you were sent to Egypt." After he was transferred to a less harsh prison, he said Canadian consular officials visited him, often bringing spies. He said he had at least three visits with CSIS agents he knew as "Mike and Bob," as well as visits from a Mountie assigned to monitor the Khadr family, Sergeant Konrad Shourie. Mr. Khadr said that Canadian consular officials were not much help to him. He also said he couldn't give them full details of the abuse. "I was never left alone with a Canadian," he said. "I couldn't say anything." He said he was never charged with any crime. This month, he said, he was suddenly let go, accompanied back to Toronto by Sgt. Shourie. He said the Mountie lent him his cellphone to call his family once he arrived in Toronto. They screamed with joy to hear he had come home. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |