Montrealer Maher Arar said Tuesday that his year-long imprisonment in Syria was a nightmarish series of beatings, threats and included more than 10 months in a cell the size of "a grave."
Mr. Arar, a Syrian-born man who came to North America as a teen and took Canadian citizenship, is calling for a public inquiry that will explain what role, if any, Canadian intelligence officials played in his arrest in New York and his subsequent deportation and imprisonment without charge in Syria.
He said that he had been summoned home from vacation by his work and, using his frequent-flier points, had been forced to fly from Tunis to Montreal via Zurich and New York. During his two-hour stopover in New York, he said, he was singled out by U.S. immigration officials and held for interrogation.
"They told me I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen," he said in Ottawa as he broke his silence four weeks after returning home.
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It was during this initial round of interrogation, he said, that he began to suspect Canadian involvement in his detention, for the people questioning him had information that could only have come from Canadian sources, at one point even proffering a copy of his 1997 lease agreement.
Despite his insistence on being returned to Canada, and assurances from a Canadian consular official that he would not be mistreated, he was flown to Jordan and then driven across the border to Syria. The beatings began in the van that met the plane in Amman, he said, and continued on and off for his time in custody.
In Syria, he spent months in a tiny cell, with no light and barely room to move.
"It was like a grave, exactly like a grave. It had no light. It was three feet wide, it was six feet long, it was seven feet deep," he said Tuesday. "I spent 10 months and 10 days in that grave."
More to come