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Missing Canadian spurs diplomatic row
© St. Petersburg Times On Sept. 25, a vacationing Canadian engineer kissed his wife goodbye, got into a taxicab and headed for the airport in Tunis, Tunisia. His family has not seen him since, and what happened to him is a growing international mystery. Little is known but this: When Maher Arar landed in New York to change planes for Montreal, he was arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which said he had ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network. He was jailed for more than a week and deported. Canadian authorities said Arar had been sent to Syria, his birthplace. But over the weekend Syrian authorities denied he was there, and now his whereabouts are unknown. "I am living a nightmare here with the kids," Arar's wife said in a phone interview Monday from Tunisia. "I don't know what's happening with my husband, and the U.S. government so far is not cooperating with the Canadian government to tell it what is happening." Arar's disappearance has sparked a diplomatic row between Canada and the United States. Canada has filed a formal protest with the U.S. government, saying it failed to properly notify Canadian authorities that one of their citizens was under detention. The case also raises fresh concerns about the secrecy in which the United States has jailed hundreds of terrorist suspects -- many of them never charged with a crime -- since the Sept. 11 attacks. "This is a bizarre, alarming tale," the Toronto Globe and Mail said in an editorial. "Mr. Arar was deported from a country in which he had no intention of staying; he was simply on an airport stopover. Although the United States suspects he is an al-Qaida terrorist, it has laid no criminal charges against him. . . . The fight against terror is a difficult one, but Canada deserves better than this from its closest neighbor. It deserves some answers." Arar, 32, was born in Syria but emigrated to Canada with his parents when he was 17. He earned a master's degree, became a telecommunications expert and married another naturalized Canadian citizen, Monia Mazigh, who has a Ph.D. in finance. Mazigh denies her husband has terrorist ties, describing him as a gentle man with no criminal record. A former co-worker at a Boston-area software firm also called him a "kind and decent guy -- if you were sick he was the guy who would come over to help you get better." Arar's problems might stem from an incident several months ago in which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police asked if he had ties to an international businessman the agency was investigating. "It was a very, very brief questioning," said Riad Saloojee of the Council on American Islamic Relations in Ottawa. "They found nothing conclusive, and after talking briefly to his lawyer, they never contacted Mr. Arar again." Last summer, Arar joined his wife, their 5-year-old daughter and infant son in Tunisia, where the family was vacationing with Arar's in-laws. On Sept. 25 he left to return to Ottawa, promising his wife he would call when he got home the next day. "But he never did," she said. "I suspected something wrong had happened to him. I phoned my brother-in-law in Montreal and he called the police and American Airlines and nobody gave him an answer until five or six days after he disappeared." Unbeknownst to his family, Arar was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and interrogated for nine hours by INS authorities. He was then taken to a Brooklyn detention center, where he was held for several days before he was able to call his mother-in-law in Ottawa and ask if she could find him a lawyer. Amal Oummih, an immigration lawyer, briefly interviewed Arar. According to Saloojee, she thought the allegations were "completely unsubstantiated and very vague." Both the lawyer and a Canadian consular official who visited Arar at the center found him "in a very, very bad emotional situation," his wife said. On a subsequent visit, the consular official was told Arar had been deported to Syria, one of the Mideast's most repressive nations. The news horrified Arar's family, who feared Syria would severely punish him because he had left the country before doing his mandatory military service. "If he receives this type of treatment by the U.S., which is a democracy, I'm very fearful to think what his future is in Syria," Saloojee said. But at a meeting in Damascus this weekend, Syrian authorities told Canadian officials that Arar was not in that country and had never been sent there. Asked about Arar, INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said: "We have no information on that case." Under U.S. law, anyone entering the United States, even if just changing planes, is subject to questioning. Only when a foreigner is charged with a violation is he advised of his right to contact his government. The United States maintains it is under no obligation to notify another government. But that violates the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, of which the United States is a signatory, says a spokesman for Amnesty International in Canada. "Whenever they have a foreign national in custody, they have to inform that person's government so it can provide whatever assistance they deem necessary," said Amnesty's John Tackaberry. Since Sept. 11 "there seems to be a developing pattern of American authorities failing to accept their international obligations relating to these types of detainees." Arar's family is angry that the United States won't say where he is. "If they suspect something, make it clear and stand him in front of a judge," his wife said. "Why they make him disappear and don't want to give any information -- this is very strange."
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