MD says terror suspect may die
Stopped eating 75 days ago in detention centre Wants medical treatment, visits with children
An Egyptian refugee who has spent five years in a Toronto jail as he fights the government’s attempt to deport him as a terrorism suspect says he’s prepared to die to protest the conditions of his detention. Mohamed Mahjoub says he stopped eating 75 days ago, and a doctor who visited him over the weekend warned that if he is not hospitalized by today he could suffer potentially fatal heart or kidney problems.
“ For me, it’s better to die, so I don’t see myself and my family, my lawyer and my supporters suffering,” Mahjoub said in a telephone interview Friday from the Toronto West Detention Centre in Rexdale. Mahjoub is asking for medical treatment for a knee injury and hepatitis C, a liver disease he contracted while in detention. He is also requesting a monthly visit with his two young children, without a Plexiglas barrier between them.
Last week, Human Rights Watch Canada wrote to Monte Kwinter, Ontario’s community safety and correctional services minister, in support of Mahjoub’s demands.
“ He is currently facing death as a result of the failure of the Government of Ontario and the Government of Canada to respond to his reasonable and most basic requests,” wrote Jasmine Herlt, director of Human Rights Watch Canada. “ His death will be a direct result of the failure of our governments to act in accordance with international standards.”
Julia Noonan, a spokeswoman for the community safety ministry, said she could not comment on Mahjoub’s case specifically, but if inmates refuse food they cannot be forced to eat and are monitored daily by a doctor.
Dr. Jane Pritchard, who visited Mahjoub on Sunday at the request of his lawyer, said he has lost more than 40 pounds, has low potassium levels and, in his deteriorating state, the facility does not have the capability to properly monitor him.
“ My main concern is that he might be at the point where he would soon develop an important cardiac arrhythmia, which could be life- threatening, and there is not the facility to monitor that adequately as an outpatient,” said Pritchard, a family physician in Toronto.
Mahjoub, who said he has consumed only water, fruit juice and the occasional broth for more than two months, is not the first detainee to embark on a hunger strike. Hassan Almrei, a Syrian refugee held in the same solitary- confinement wing, ended his strike recently after 73 days. While his demand of being allowed out of his cell for an additional 40 minutes a day was not granted, Almrei said he resumed eating due to the outpouring of support he received from the Canadian public.
Almrei and Mahjoub are two of five men held on national security certificates, a provision in Canada’s immigration law that allows the government to deport non- citizens on the grounds of security. Much of the information in their case is heard privately, but according to public court documents, Mahjoub is accused of being a high- ranking member of Egyptian Al Jihad, which intelligence services say now is tied to Al Qaeda. He has admitted to working with an agricultural company owned by Osama bin Laden, who heads Al Qaeda, in Sudan in the mid- 1990s. Mahjoub acknowledged that he met with bin Laden and was paid $ 10,000 ( U. S.) for his work before leaving over a wage dispute.
His case is currently working its way through the courts, but he has been refused bail. The detention centre where Mahjoub is detained is a provincial facility where inmates are held in pre- trial custody or serve sentences of less than two years. Noonan said medical treatment is provided, but policy forbids certain activities, such as the hour- long exercise program that Almrei requested or the touch- visits with his children demanded by Mahjoub. Hunger strikes have a long history as a form of protest or political activism, dating back most famously to Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition to British rule in India. Decades later in 1981, Irish republican Bobby Sands died after 66 days on a prison hunger strike, sparking protests in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland.
“ They’re most effective when there’s a clear- cut cause which has a certain amount of sympathy and they generate publicity,” said University of Toronto history professor Arthur Sheps.
It’s difficult to determine where public opinion now lies in the post- 9/ 11 environment, Sheps said, when much of the population considers the fight against terrorism an actual war and certain civil liberties are suspended.
Canada’s only known detainee at the American camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also reportedly participated in a 15-day hunger strike in July, joining more than 200 other inmates opposing the legal limbo in which they are held. Omar Khadr, now 18, was hospitalized during his strike to protest the fact he’s being held without charges, and the “ military’s disrespect of Islam,” according to court documents.
“It’s destroying us slowly,” Khadr told his American lawyer about life at Camp 5, the detention facility where he’s held, according to the notes written by his lawyer for his lawsuit against the U. S. government. Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U. S. medic during a battle in Afghanistan. The court notes indicate Khadr planned to stop eating again and is believed to be one of the 210 inmates currently waging another hunger strike.