The media has been reporting on Justice Iacobucci’s supplemental report into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almaki, Mauyyed Nureddin, and Ahmad Abou-El-Maati.
But as this blogger points out, nobody seems to have reported on Ahmad Abou El-Maati’s brother, Amer El-Maati:
“In 1996, Amer travelled to Surobi, to find his younger brother who had spent four years fighting alongside Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against the Taliban. The pair retreated north with Hekmatyar’s forces, and then Ahmad went to Tehran to visit their mother and sister, while Amer traveled to Peshawar where he began working for the NGO Health and Education Projects International, created by Ahmed Khadr.
In 1998 he obtained a Canadian passport while living in Pakistan. Khadr’s son Abdurahman testified in Montreal in the summer of 2004 that El-Maati had given his Canadian passport to a man known as Idriss.”
Amer El-Maati is a Kuwaiti born Canadian citizen who the United States has alleged is a member of Al-Qaeda, and who attended flight school to possibly hijack a Canadian plane to fly into American buildings. There is currently a bounty on his head of $5 million by the United States, and is known as a wanted terrorist. At this very moment in time, nobody knows the whereabouts of this man.
A little more background on Ahmad Abou El-Maati. In August of 2001, before the 9/11 attacks took place, Mr.El-Maati was stopped at the U.S.-Canada border, where guards found a schematic map of Ottawa marking government buildings and nuclear research facilities. Despite denying ownership of the map, a friend later admitted that Mr.El-Maati showed it to him.
“He showed me the map. And the map had literally all kinds of government installations,” said a man who used to know him. “If I was a border person and I saw this map with a Middle Eastern-looking person and all these nuclear sites and all these government installations I can understand why they said, ‘Well, hey pal, what are you doing?’ And apparently they really grilled him. When he came to me he was nearly in tears he was shaken up so bad about it.”
In November of 2001, a document granting Amer El-Maati Canadian citizenship was discovered in an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan. Despite being held several times by Syrian and Egyptian agents, he was eventually released.
The connection to Maher Arar and Ahmad El-Maati is based on the statement that Mr.Arar said he “once bumped into Mr.El-Maati in a mechanic’s garage in Ottawa”. And if you’ll remember, Omar Khadr said during interrogation with Canadian officials, interrogation that the government of Canada has asked not be used at his trial, that he met Maher Arar in Afghanistan.
Related
An alternate view on what really happened with Maher Arar. Western Standard, February of 2007.
