Christopher Reynolds, Canadian Press, published on Saturday, April 23, 2022, 2:18 PM EDT
A former Guantanamo Bay detainee is suing the Canadian government over his alleged role in his 14 years behind bars marked by torture and intimidation.
Mohamed Ould Slahi, a Moorish man who has lived in Montreal for two months, filed a $ 35 million lawsuit on Friday, claiming that improper intelligence provided by Canadian authorities contributed to his detention at the U.S. Naval Prison, where he said that he had suffered severe beatings, sleep deprivation and sexual abuse.
Slahi’s lawsuit, whose story turned into a best-selling memoir and Hollywood film, said surveillance by a Canadian spy agency and police force had been handed over to his U.S. investigators. In the end, their “torture broke him” and sparked a false confession about a plan to blow up the CN Tower, which he had never heard of, court documents said.
Slahi, now a 51-year-old writer in a Dutch theater troupe, left Canada in 2000 after authorities from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and the RCMP began questioning him about alleged links to Ahmed Resam, the so-called a bomber who was planning to attack the airport in Los Angeles. They had briefly visited the same large mosque in Montreal.
The Federal Court of Canada ruled in 2009 that Slahi, who was once a permanent resident, was not entitled to intelligence documents because he was neither a citizen nor subject to legal proceedings in Canada.
The Attorney General of Canada has not yet responded to allegations against CSIS and the RCMP, which did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
Mustafa Farooq, head of the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said Canada’s alleged complicity in the torture of Canadians stemmed from Islamophobic stereotypes and that accountability was needed.
“The reality is that Mr Mohammedou was in danger in part because he happened to be praying in a mosque where he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and accidentally under surveillance by the Canadian state,” Farouk said in a telephone interview.
“Part of the reason it’s so horrifying is that the Canadian government and the Canadian National Security Administration were involved in torturing a man who didn’t do anything wrong, that we knew about it and that we tried to make sure that Canadians never find out about it “
Farouk made comparisons with the cases of Maher Arar and Omar Kadr.
Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained in New York in September 2002 and sent abroad by US authorities, ending up in a prison-like prison in Damascus. Tortured, he gave false confessions to al Qaeda. He agreed to a $ 10.5 million deal and accepted an apology from then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper for “some role that Canadian officials may have played” in the affair.
The case of Omar Kadr, a Canadian citizen who was detained in Guantanamo for 10 years at the age of 15 for the military assassination of a US sergeant in Afghanistan, ended in a $ 10.5 million court case with the federal government in 2018.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on April 23, 2022.
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