Canadian security operatives asked Sudan — a country with a notorious record of torture and abuse in its prisons — to arrest and detain Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik, according to heavily redacted Canadian documents, marked "secret."
The newly obtained documents provide the strongest evidence to date that Canadian Security Intelligence agents engaged in the Bush-era U.S. practice of getting other countries to imprison those it considered security risks aboard rather than charge them with any crime.
"Now we have the smoking gun, that our government through CSIS was responsible for Mr. Abdelrazik's incarceration" in Sudan, NDP MP Paul Dewar said yesterday.
Along with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Dewar is in possession of the documents obtained as part of Mr. Abdelrazik's court battle to return to his family in Montreal.
CSIS, which has never explained its murky role in the imprisonment and overseas interrogations of Mr. Abdelrazik, denied it had him arrested in Khartoum. The agency did, however, keep him under surveillance for years in Montreal before he left to visit his ailing mother in Khartoum in 2003.
"CSIS does not and has not arranged for the arrest of Canadian citizens overseas," Isabelle Scott, a spokeswoman for the intelligence agency said in an e-mail yesterday. "In the case of Mr. Abdelrazik, CSIS reiterates that it acted in accordance with the CSIS Act, law and policy."
But the newly released documents, including one dated Dec. 16, 2006, marked secret and sent from Khartoum to senior Foreign Affairs and security officials in Ottawa, says "Abousfian Abdelrazik was arrested on September 10, 2003 [words blacked out] recommendation by CSIS, for suspected involvement with terrorist elements."
Later in the same document, an extensive summary of the Abdelrazik case up to that date, it is confirmed that Sudan's secret police believe Mr. Abdelrazik is innocent.
Sudan's security agencies are fed up with CSIS for washing its hands of the case "despite the fact that initial recommendations for his detention emerged from CSIS," the document says.
"As far as I know, this is the first case of Canadian rendition," Mr. Dewar said, referring to the now-outlawed and discredited U.S. Central Intelligence Agency practice of having suspects picked up abroad and sometimes even sent to third countries, where brutal treatment and harsh interrogation methods were common.
"The pattern is similar to the Bush administration use of rendition. How else can we explain that CSIS — Canada's CIA — was requesting that a foreign government incarcerate one of our citizens in some kind of preventative detention … put him in jail because he might be dangerous, this was exactly what the Bush philosophy was," Mr. Dewar said.
Mr. Abdelrazik says he was beaten and tortured during nearly two years in Sudanese jails, an account consistent with Canada's own internal reports on the Khartoum's regime's grim human-rights record.
In an effort to discredit his accounts of torture, Canadian Justice Department lawyers have tried to get Mr. Abdelrazik to say scars on his abdomen were self-inflicted mutilations.
Sudan's security apparatus makes no effort to obscure its willingness to use brutal methods. Last month, Sudan's intelligence chief Salah Gosh publicly threatened "to sever the limbs of those who attempt" to indict President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
The apparently useful working relationship between CSIS and Sudan's National Security and Intelligence Agency carried risks that were well understood by Canadian officials. In another secret memo, sent just before the CSIS interrogation team headed for Khartoum less than a month after Mr. Abdelrazik was imprisoned, a senior Foreign Affairs official warned that "Ahmed El-Mahdi, a Canadian citizen and suspected war criminal" had once held the post of Sudan's Director of Foreign Security.
"We will advise CSIS of this, before any CSIS team travels to Khartoum," he added.
In a motion circulated yesterday, Mr. Dewar proposed that Parliament's Foreign Affairs committee summon CSIS director Jim Judd, "to explain Canada's role in the arrest of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik by Sudan's National Security and Intelligence Agency on September 10, 2003."
Successive Canadian governments have never explained the role of Canadian agents in Mr. Abdelrazik's imprisonment. But a trove of previously secret documents show Canadian diplomats were ordered to refuse his plea for consular assistance when U.S. counter-intelligence agents interrogated him.
CSIS agents also flew to Sudan where they questioned Mr. Abdelrazik in a Khartoum prison.
The new documents add credence to another, previously disclosed document, stamped "CSIS," that said Mr. Abdelrazik was imprisoned "at our request" — meaning Canada's.
Mr. Abdelrazik is now living in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. The Harper government refuses to issue him a passport. Its long-standing promise to give him emergency travel documents if he secured a reservation to fly home to Montreal was broken when a confirmed itinerary was arranged. Foreign Affairs officials now insist he must first have a fully paid-for ticket. He is destitute and the government has threatened to charge anyone who loans or gives him money for a ticket.
The Harper government says it sought Mr. Abdelrazik's removal from the UN Security Council's list of al-Qaeda operatives more than a year ago. He was originally added to the list — the only living Canadian on it — by the Bush administration. Although the blacklist includes a travel ban, the right to return home is explicitly permitted.
"The effective banishment of Mr. Abdelrazik is intentional," says Ottawa lawyer Yavar Hameed, who has been handling the case for free for more than a year. "By keeping him in the embassy they can have him under closer surveillance."
Then foreign minister Maxime Bernier said he was granting Mr. Abdelrazik "temporary safe haven" in the embassy, but he has been living there since April last year.
