Shakir Baloch was awakened at 3:30 a.m. yesterday in a Brooklyn jail cell, his home for the past seven months, and told to get ready for a trip to New Jersey and a flight to Toronto.
At Newark Airport, U.S. officials gave him his deportation papers and an Air Canada ticket and nothing else. They withheld his Canadian passport, social insurance card, driver's licence and other identification documents, saying that they would send them to the Canadian consulate in New York, where officials would pass them on eventually.
So when Mr. Baloch, 39, arrived late yesterday morning at Pearson International Airport, he was clutching only a manila envelope and wearing a prison-issue white T-shirt, beltless and pocketless khaki pants and loafers. He did not even have a quarter to make a phone call.
"They didn't give me my citizenship card; they didn't give me any ID. They just put me on a plane and said, 'Your consulate will take care of everything,' " Mr. Baloch said.
His lawyer, Martin Stolar, who acts for the New-York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, put it more bluntly in an interview: "He was treated like an animal when he was in what they call the special housing unit, the hole, and then left to go like a non-person, as if, 'We don't care what we did to you. Good-bye. Now we're done with you; we've had our fun.' "
A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs said it will forward the identity documents to Mr. Baloch as soon as it receives them, which may prove cumbersome given that he is estranged from his wife and has no money and is uncertain where he will be living.
Apart from a handful of reporters, no one -- neither family members nor members of the Muslim community -- was there to welcome Mr. Baloch back to Toronto.
Mr. Baloch, who came to Canada in 1987 from his native Pakistan, is the only Canadian citizen known to have been arrested in the antiterrorism sweep after the attacks Sept. 11 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
Amnesty International said in a recent report that many of the 1,200 people arrested in the largest U.S. investigation in history had been unable to challenge the legality of their prolonged detentions and had been denied the right to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Many were from Muslim and Middle Eastern countries.
Amnesty cited anecdotal reports of prolonged solitary confinement, heavy shackling, abrupt prison transfers, lack of adequate exercise and closed immigration hearings. About 100 people have been charged with criminal offences unrelated to the events of Sept. 11 and several hundred with immigration violations.
Mr. Baloch remains perplexed about why he was caught in the dragnet and thrown into a tiny cell of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
"The INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service], the FBI picked me up, kept me in solitary confinement for five months. I don't know why. I don't have that answer."
Mr. Baloch, speaking in a low voice, appeared relaxed and calm as he said he felt safe, on Canadian soil, for the first time since his arrest Sept. 20. His first priority was to see his 14-year-old diabetic daughter, who lives with his wife in northeast Toronto.
"I'm innocent. Why should I be worried? I'm depressed a little bit why they did this to me."
In a later interview, as a Globe and Mail reporter drove him to see his daughter, Mr. Baloch said that like others he was distraught at the suicide attacks on U.S. sites, which left thousands dead and injured.
"I feel sorry. The people that did this attack killed innocent people. I feel sorry like any American, but they did this to me and I don't see any difference between them. I was innocent, too."
