A Canadian citizen jailed in Egypt as a terrorism suspect for the past two years has suddenly been released from prison.
Ahmad Abou El-Maati was let out of prison yesterday and showed up at the door of his mother's house in Cairo. His case has received scant attention in Canada, butHis story may be important in understanding the suspicion that came to hover over another onetime terrorism suspect: Maher Arar, the Ottawa computer engineer who wants a public inquiry into his 10-month detention in Syria.
In November, 2001, Mr. El-Maati became the first of four Canadians within the span of a year to be jailed in Syria. The suspicions that surrounded him may been linked to a Canadian counterterrorism investigation that eventually involved Mr. Arar the last of the four men to be jailed in Syria.
A truck driver and devout Muslim, the 39-year-old Mr. El-Maati left Toronto for the Middle East after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. He said that Canadian counterterrorism agents were making his life miserable.
Much of the scrutiny resulted from a map that U.S. border agents uncovered in his truck in late August, 2001. Sources say it was a blueprint-like diagram of several buildings in Ottawa, including government centres and nuclear-research facilities.
Mr. El-Maati has denied the map was his. But border guards who found it detained him for eight hours. After the Sept. 11 attacks, fears grew about sleeper al-Qaeda agents, and life in Canada became unbearable for him.
He complained of being constantly watched and grew fearful of crossing the border.
Sources say that counterterrorism agents were interviewing Mr. El-Maati's colleagues about him, suggesting he had spent time in training camps in Afghanistan, where his brother's Canadian citizenship papers turned up in the fall of 2001. The agents also planned to set up a "sting" operation against him, sources say. By October, 2001, he and his brother had been placed on global terrorism watch lists. Family members and friends say that RCMP officers questioned Mr. El-Maati just before he boarded a plane out of Toronto. When he landed in Syria in November, 2001, he was arrested. He was transferred to an Egyptian jail. A succession of court decisions ordered him freed, but nothing happened until this week. From Cairo yesterday, his mother, Samira, said her son knocked on the door of the family's home. She said she did not know why he was let go or whether he would return to Canada.
A few months after Mr. El-Maati left Canada, RCMP investigators executed several search warrants around Ottawa, looking for explosives and documents about government structures. No explosives were found. But one of the searched residences belonged to Syrian-born Canadian computer engineer Abdullah Almalki. He travelled to Syria in May of 2002, where he was arrested and remains jailed. In September, 2002, Maher Arar stopped in New York on the way back to Canada from Tunisia. U.S. agents intercepted him and sent him to Damascus as an alleged al-Qaeda member. They said he was on a watch list as an associate of Mr. Almalki. Mr. Arar spent 10 months in a Syrian jail.
