High- risk traveller arrested upon return to Canada
RCMP want to know what Palestinian- Canadian was doing
WINDSOR, ONT. Mohammed El Shaer was on the RCMP’s list of “high- risk travellers,” had no valid passport and was prohibited from leaving Canada when he disappeared from Windsor last winter and somehow made his way to Turkey.
“I guess we know who got the last laugh,” the 27- year- old Palestinian- Canadian wrote in an email to a National Post reporter in March. “Allah’s plan has beaten your fragile entire nation’s plan. May Allah guide you to the truth or destroy you.”
But El Shaer wasn’t laughing when he appeared in a Windsor courtroom on Friday after police caught him trying to return to Canada. Arrested at the Calgary airport on Oct. 9, he was taken back to Windsor by police to await trial.
“The investigation is continuing,” said RCMP Superintendent Lise Crouch, head of the Ontario Integrated National Security Enforcement Team. She said police were still trying to determine where El Shaer went and what he did while he was overseas.
The concerns stem from his alleged use of fraudulent travel documents as well as his associations, notably with Ahmad Waseem, a violent extremist also from Windsor who joined ISIL and was reportedly killed in March.
But Amarnath Amarasingam, a researcher who spoke to El Shaer as recently as a few weeks ago, doubts he crossed into Syria. He said El Shaer told him he went to Turkey because he was fed up with being under surveillance.
If so, Turkey — the gateway for foreign fighters on their way to Syria — may not have been the best destination to appease security concerns about him. But El Shaer was so active online that Amarasingam doesn’t see how he could have been in Syria.
“I’d be quite surprised, but before that I’m not sure,” said Amarasingam, who is working on a major research project about Canadian foreign fighters. El Shaer’s wife and children were with him in Turkey, he said. “He told me he was just hanging out.” While El Shaer ad- mitted to knowing Waseem, he believed he was misunderstood.
Dressed in orange prison garb, El Shaer stood without speaking as he appeared in the Ontario Court of Justice by video link from the South West Detention Centre in Windsor. His case was put over until Oct. 20. He is awaiting a bail hearing on six charges.
According to court records, on Sept. 23 he was charged with breach of probation and making a false statement to Citizenship and Immigration Canada to obtain a passport. He was already facing a separate breach of probation charge filed on Feb. 25, and on Feb. 15 he was charged with knowingly making a false document, using a forged passport and possessing an identity document in the name of Mohamed Nour Hassan Moussa.
This is the third time in less than two years that El Shaer has been arrested after returning from trips to the Middle East. The first journey was in November 2013, when he and Waseem took a circuitous route to Turkey. Waseem then crossed into Syria ( he joined ISIL this January and was reportedly killed in March).
In Turkey, El Shaer told Canadian officials his passport had been damaged and, after giving false information, he received an emergency travel document. He returned to Canada in January 2014 and was charged with a passport- related fraud.
He was released on bail and prohibited from leaving Ontario pending his trial, but he somehow made his way to Egypt and Sudan. Again, he returned and was arrested at Toronto’s Pearson airport. “I made a mistake and I apologize for that,” he told a judge after pleading guilty on Dec. 19, 2014. He was sentenced to 24 days and banned from travelling outside Canada. “It won’t happen again,” he said. But shortly after he was released from prison, he disappeared again. On March 2, Waseem posted El Shaer’s photo on Twitter with the caption, “Canadian Muslims guess which ‘ high risk traveller’ made it into Sham?” ( Extremists refer to Syria and the surrounding region as Al Sham.)
“So what’s ur excuse,” Waseem added, along with the hashtags # Hijra and # IS. Hijra is Arabic for migration while IS appears to refer to ISIL.
In a March email from Turkey, El Shaer told the National Post: “Canada is home to me, my family, but when you’re constantly harassed by government officials it makes life a little bit difficult being followed around everywhere, and your name in the media constantly doesn’t make it easy to land your dream job.”