Ottawa — Prime Minister Paul Martin yesterday denounced “leaks” by federal officials linking Maher Arar to terrorism even as the Ottawa man pleaded for a public inquiry to clear his name.
“These leaks are totally unacceptable,” Mr. Martin said, referring to media reports that Mr. Arar trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and had other connections to the terrorist group.
The news reports attributed the information to anonymous government sources. The RCMP has launched a criminal investigation into the leaks, officials in Public Security Minister Anne McLellan's office said.
Mr. Arar, who spent 10 months in solitary confinement in a Syrian prison after he was deported from the United States as a terrorism suspect, said he has no confidence that the RCMP will be able to find out who is smearing his reputation.
The RCMP itself appears to be the source of misinformation that was provided to U.S. authorities and that led to his deportation in October of 2002, he said in an interview.
“There is a shadow over my name. There appears to be a campaign to discredit me even before I got back to Canada,” Mr. Arar said.
Syrian officials released him three months ago when they could not come up with evidence that he was involved with terrorism.
Mr. Arar said the Syrians tortured him into admitting falsely that he trained at an al-Qaeda camp. in Afghanistan.
U.S. immigration officials arrested the Syrian-born man at New York's JFK Airport and later deported him to Syria although he was travelling on a Canadian passport.
Some U.S. news reports have said Mr. Arar had the names of known terrorists in a notebook when he was arrested. He said he was travelling with a Palm Pilot and a laptop computer and both had 500 to 600 names in their data bases, most of them other employees of a computer company where he worked. as an engineer.
To his knowledge none of the people are terrorists, he said.
The hard drive of his laptop computer had in its storage hundreds of e-mails and website addresses.
He said most of this information related to his work as a telecommunications engineer, but he had visited some websites to get news about the Middle East and information about his religion.
These included Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language satellite TV news network, and a site allowing him to listen to readings of the Koran.
A devout Sunni Muslim, Mr. Arar said the Islamic websites he visited were not operated by extremists. “Nothing out of the normal range of free speech.”
He said he is not particularly political. When U.S. and Syrian interrogators asked him about events in the Middle East he denounced suicide bombings by Palestinians and Israeli bulldozing of Palestinian homes.
Mr. Arar suspects the U.S. authorities doubted his truthfulness because they received incorrect information from Canadian officials.
He notes, for example, that some Canadian government records about his case say he became a citizen in 1995 when, in fact, it was 1990.
So when the U.S. interrogators asked him when he became a Canadian, and he said 1990, “they accused me of lying.”
Mr. Arar said the Americans may have thought he was trying to conceal something and the quickest way to get the information was to send him to Syria to be tortured.
Speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Martin said that it is “really unacceptable” for Canadian officials to pass along unsubstantiated information about Mr. Arar.
Mr. Martin said he is placing high importance on internal investigations into the way the case was handled by the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
He left the door open to a public inquiry if Ms. McLellan believes one is needed.
It is “perfectly natural” that Mr. Arar is doing everything he can to try to get the facts, Mr. Martin said, “and I've made it very clear ... I'm going to get to the bottom of this.”
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