He was red-flagged by security agencies last year as a potential terrorist. Now cleared in Canada, he remains on foreign watch lists, his case a stark example of how the taint of suspicion can linger with frightening effect.
In Frankfurt, he was followed. In London, an Air Canada agent told him he’d probably never be allowed to fly home again. In Washington, officials have not responded to his request to take his name off watch lists.
Last month, a “secret” U.S. cable naming him as a terror suspect surfaced on WikiLeaks. His name was blacked out, but the disclosure threatened to catapult it into the public domain.
“I felt sick to my stomach,” he says, speaking in an interview about his predicament for the first time. The Canadian resident, born in Turkey, asked that he be identified only through the pseudonym Ali. He fears his citizenship application, business prospects and children’s futures would be jeopardized.
“They are going to grow up here,” Ali, 31, said of his two toddlers. “What if they are made to not feel at home because of their father?”
It has been a decade since the Maher Arar affair shone a spotlight on how “persons of interest” who surface on the periphery of Canadian probes can be conflated into top-tier terrorism suspects by other countries. Ottawa put bureaucratic fixes in place to prevent a repeat. Yet Canadian counterterrorism authorities acknowledge a cold reality: Once they pass intelligence south – and they insist they must do so – they have little influence on what follows. And now that the Conservative government is negotiating a shared security perimeter with the United States, there will be more information-sharing in the future.
No officials will speak on the record about Ali, an entrepreneur who runs a cleaning business, though officials will say the situation he describes fits a broader and vexing trend. Once warnings are sent across borders and between agencies, it can be impossible to pull them back.
In January, 2010, Canadian police spotted Ali driving his car down Highway 401. Beside him was a gawky Iranian-Canadian in his 20s. What police knew then, and Ali says he didn't, was that his companion was under surveillance as the No. 1 terrorism suspect in Canada.
Ali had met Hiva Alizadeh years earlier at a halal butchery. Once friends, the two men were made closer by the fact that their wives had converted to Islam together. Their interactions were innocent, Ali says, but the watchful eyes of Canadian security agents took note.
On Feb. 5, 2010, the U.S. embassy in Ottawa cabled Washington urging that Ali’s U.S. work visa be pulled and that he be stopped if he tried to cross the border. Why? “His association with Hiva Alizadeh, a Canadian citizen born in Iran who is strongly suspected of posing an imminent terrorist threat,” the State Department cable said.
The cable was published on the WikiLeaks website recently, but with identifying information blacked out. Some uncensored copies are in the hands of news organizations. In a total, a dozen people were placed on U.S. watch lists after being seen with Mr. Alizadeh in Canada.
Last August, six months after the U.S. diplomats sent the cable, the Mounties arrested Mr. Alizadeh and two alleged co-conspirators in Ottawa. The three men stand accused of building dozens of detonation devices for an impending terrorist attack.
Ali says he learned of the alleged terror plot on the news, while visiting family in Turkey. A few days later, he was passing through Germany – sightseeing in Frankfurt for a day in a rental car before catching the cheapest flight home, he says.
