Al Qaeda suspect back in T. O.

HELD IN PAKISTAN: Mystery surrounds RCMP’s release of eldest Khadr son

Abdullah Khadr, who Western intelligence services allege ran an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, has been released from custody in Pakistan and returned to Toronto, a free man. The Toronto Star has learned the 24- year- old Canadian, whose brother is the only Canationed dian held in the U. S. detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was accompanied by Canadian officials on a flight to Toronto’s Pearson International Airport last Friday. Khadr is the eldest of Ahmed Said Khadr’s four sons. The senior Khadr, an accused terrorist financier, was killed in a 2003 shootout with Pakistani forces. Abdullah Khadr was ques- at the airport by RCMP investigators, then dropped off at his grandparents’ home in Scarborough and told he was a “ free man,” according to his relatives and lawyer.

Court documents show that Khadr and his sister Zaynab are under investigation by the RCMP for terrorism- related offences. But Khadr has not been charged criminally in Canada. Two days after he returned, RCMP investigators visited him again and questioned him at a local doughnut shop. The revelation of Khadr’s return raises a series of questions about who precisely was holding him in Pakistan and why he was quietly released.

“ How did he get flown into the country? Who was holding him? Why has his family been told nothing?” Khadr’s Edmontonbased lawyer Dennis Edney asked yesterday.

U. S. officials told the Star yesterday they may seek to have charges laid against Khadr, then have him extradited to the U. S. to face trial.

“ He is a Canadian citizen, so when he returns to Canada, he is in the Canadians’ hands,” one source said. “ But the U. S. has an interest in this man.” The Washington sources said the U. S. would likely issue a provisional request for arrest to the RCMP for unspecified crimes. Washington and Ottawa have an extradition treaty and the U. S. generally makes as many as 130 extradition requests per year from Canada.

Ottawa makes a smaller number of requests from the U. S. to have Americans returned to Canada to face trial. Khadr’s whereabouts have been the subject of much speculation since he disappeared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Intelligence officials believed he was hiding in the mountainous region along Pakistan and Afghanistan’s border.

In February 2004, a report surfaced that he was the suicide bomber who killed a Canadian solider stationed near Kabul. Khadr came out of hiding briefly to end those rumours, appearing in silhouette for a CBC Television interview. Five months later he cut off contact with his family — and a Pakistani newspaper reported that a Canadian terrorism suspect had been taken into custody. Edney said that the Canadian government has refused to confirm Khadr’s whereabouts since that report in October 2004, citing privacy concerns. But Khadr asked Canadian officials who visited him in custody to inform his family about his capture, Edney said yesterday.

“ Why didn’t they do that? Why is he now released without any explanation?” he said.

Khadr’s return and some of those questions are likely to spark debate on the campaign trail and put security issues on the election agenda.

In 1996, then prime minister Jean Chrétien intervened on behalf of Khadr’s father, who had been arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of financing a bombing. The senior Khadr was released weeks after Chrétien visited Pakistan where he raised the case with then prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

That was later seen as an embarrassment to the government when it emerged that the father was an alleged Al Qaeda financier.

Abdullah Khadr later alleged that when Chrétien met with his father, he told him: “ Once I was a son of a farmer. And I became prime minister. Maybe one day you will become one.”

In government circles there’s even a term called the “ Khadr effect,” which is meant to serve as a warning against intervening in security cases, which could later prove embarrassing.

In his interview with CBC last year, Abdullah Khadr described growing up with Osama bin Laden, but denied any connections with Al Qaeda or reports that he ran a terrorist training camp. He admitted that as a teenager he attended the Khalden camp in Afghanistan, which intelligence officials allege was linked to Al Qaeda. “Anyone who wants to get trained can get trained in Afghanistan. If you want to fire a Kalashnikov it is like in Canada going and learning hockey. Anybody can do it. A 10- year- old boy can fire a Kalashnikov in Afghanistan. So it’s not a big deal,” he said. The camp was destroyed after 9/ 11. But it was once used to train Al Qaeda militants, according to testimony from Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian dubbed the “ millennium bomber” for his failed attempt to blow up the Los Angeles airport in December 1999. When asked about 9/ 11 in the CBC interview, Khadr replied that he felt sorry for those who were killed but admiration for the hijackers. “ It was very wild to see a person seeing a building in front of him and he’s going 900 kilometres per hour straight in the building. That was very hard to believe. If you believe in something very hard you can do that,” he said.

“ So you felt admiration for the people who did this?” the CBC reporter asked him.

“ Yes. Because they did some things that stunned the entire world,” Khadr replied. “ Everybody for entire, like months, was only talking about that.” When contacted yesterday through relatives, Khadr declined to be interviewed.

His return means all surviving Khadr family members but one are now living in Scarborough, including the youngest son, Karim, who was paralyzed in the 2003 battle where his father died. Abdurahman Khadr, 22, was also in the news this week asking a federal court for his passport after his application for a renewal was refused. The only member of the family not in Canada is Omar Khadr, now 19. He has been detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since his capture at the age of 15. He has been charged with murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed an army medic in Afghanistan and is scheduled to make his first appearance before a U. S. military commission in Cuba on Jan. 10.