Abousfian Abdelrazik pauses during an interview with The Globe and Mail's Paul Koring in September, 2009.The Globe and Mail
Two men accused of links to terrorism by the Canadian government plotted to blow up an airplane in the skies between Montreal and France, La Presse is reporting.
The newspaper says it obtained a summary of an encrypted conversation between Abousfian Abdelrazik and Adil Charkaoui that was intercepted by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 2000.
The Montrealers, both immigrants from North Africa who arrived in the 1990s, discussed using explosives hidden in a key chain, the paper says.
The two men had been placed under surveillance by CSIS a decade ago after another Montrealer from North Africa was caught crossing the border with a carload of explosives.
Mr. Charkaoui and Mr. Abdelrazik's lawyer denied the allegations raised in the La Presse article.
Mr. Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, is suing Ottawa for $27-million alleging government complicity in overseas torture for the years he spent detained in his native Sudan. Targeted as a possible al-Qaeda operative and followed by Canadian counterterrorism agents for years, he is the only Canadian on the United Nation's terrorist blacklist.
Mr. Charkaoui, who is suing the government for $24.5-million, spent six years under a federal detention and surveillance regime after being accused by Ottawa of being an al-Qaeda operative. In 2009, however, he successfully challenged the government's security certificate evidence against him after lawyers representing CSIS said the spy agency could not abide court-ordered disclosures of its secrets.
In 2005, the Federal Court of Canada ordered that the two men not be allowed to associate with one another, though the reasons why were not made clear at the time.
Reacting to the report, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney declined comment on protected intelligence information.
But Mr. Kenney said that generally when Ottawa moves to neutralize suspected terrorists it does so for good reasons – even if it can't always articulate them publicly.
"When we take such positions it's not based on a hunch, it's not based on innuendo … it's based on very robust intelligence," he said in a conference call from Thailand Friday.
He said political action groups supporting such individuals should "think very carefully about this."
In April, The Globe and Mail reported that Mr. Abdelrazik received $10,000 from an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist "financier," according to U.S. documents.
Mr. Abdelrazik is alleged to have made an admission about receiving the money to unspecified interrogators, according to a "secret" intelligence file that surfaced via WikiLeaks. The U.S. Department of Defence file gave no explanation as to what the money might have been used for, nor does it provide any evidence the transaction actually took place.
Until then, nothing had backed up the terrorist-financing allegations that have long dogged Mr. Abdelrazik, who is now fighting to remove his name from the UN blacklist.
Mr. Abdelrazik's lawsuit, which claims he was tortured in Sudan at Canada's behest, is buttressed by federal government memos saying he was jailed "at our request." Government lawyers, who deny complicity in torture, suggest that scars on Mr. Abdelrazik's torso were self-inflicted.
Jill Mahoney
Colin Freeze