Syrian charged in Arar torture case
The Syrian intelligence officer whom Maher Arar calls “the face” of his torture has been charged in absentia under a never-before-used section of the Criminal Code.
Col. George Salloum, head of interrogation at the notorious Palestine Branch prison in Damascus, is accused of supervising the torture of Arar, and inflicting some of it, in the year after the Ottawa engineer was extradited to Syria in October 2002.
Salloum was charged Tuesday under a section of the Criminal Code, added in 1985, that gives Canadian officials the power to charge individuals with torture even when the crime is committed outside the country.
A Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Arar was detained by U.S. authorities at JFK Airport in September, 2002, as he was returning to Ottawa from a vacation in Tunisia. Even though he was carrying a Canadian passport, U.S. officials sent him to Syria because they suspected he had ties to al-Qaida. He was the first of four Canadians imprisoned and tortured in Damascus.
In a prepared statement read by his wife, Monia Mazigh, Arar welcomed news of the criminal charges. “It is my hope that George Salloum will be found alive, arrested and extradited to face Canadian justice,” he said.
But whether Salloum actually sees the inside of a Canadian courtroom is debatable. Police can trace his whereabouts to Syria four years ago. Assuming he is alive, he would have to leave war-torn Syria if Canada is to have any reasonable chance of prosecution.
“There have been cases in the war-crimes context in some countries when, years later, a foreign torturer is spotted on some bus somewhere by a victim,” Craig Forcese, an international law expert at the University of Ottawa, said in an email. “And maybe he will end up somewhere where we can extradite him.
“But getting a hold of the accused and then often collecting the evidence of events that took place overseas is always a challenge.”
Arar’s lawyer, Paul Champ, said Interpol has issued a global alert for Salloum, which means there’s a chance he will be picked up by authorities if he ever leaves Syria.
“Frankly, with the situation in Syria, there’s a possibility,” Champ said in an interview. “Before the civil war, there was zero chance since Syria would never extradite someone like him. But now, he might defect, or the Assad regime might fall, forcing him to flee to another country.”
Thought to be in his early 50s, Salloum is bald, with a round face and stubbly beard. In the 2006 book Ghost Plane, British journalist Stephen Grey describes Salloum as a torturer who extracts information “by extreme force, both physical and psychological,” with methods borrowed from the Stasi, the former East German secret police.
Salloum was in charge of the Palestine Branch when three other Canadian citizens, including Ottawa’s Abdullah Almalki, were imprisoned and tortured in the same facility.
Champ said the evidence against Salloum includes extensive statements from Arar as well as Canadian diplomats who met with Salloum while visiting Arar in prison and other former prisoners.
Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada’s English branch, applauded the decision by the RCMP and federal and Ontario justice officials to pursue the torture charge.