The wife of terror suspect Mohamed Harkat says the raid on her and her husband’s Ottawa home was “a humiliating process” and “a horrible, horrible experience.” “I would say that after my husband’s arrest six-and-half years ago, it was the second worst day of my life,” Sophie Harkat told Canada AM from her home in Ottawa Thursday. About a dozen border agents, accompanied by RCMP, local and provincial police and three sniffer dogs, descended on Harkat’s home Tuesday morning and removed dozens of boxes filled with the couple’s personal items.
Supporters gathered to hear Mohamed Harkat (Security Certificate detainee) speak at his first ever public rally, after a recent bail decision allowing him to attend political events.
TORONTO — A terrorism suspect pleaded to be returned to prison yesterday, as a reluctant Federal Court judge tried – and failed – to come up with an alternative. “Do I have a choice?” asked Mr. Justice Simon Noel, several times. “… I never thought it would come to this.” But Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, an Egyptian deemed to be a threat to Canada’s national security, insisted it was the only way. “I have to go back to jail to protect my family,” he told the judge. It was a strange spectacle, but not an unanticipated one. Constant surveillance by federal agents outside of prison, Mr. Mahjoub argued, was worse than life behind bars.
A novel Federal Court ruling restricts the ability of special advocates, during security certificate reviews, to test the veracity of confidential information supplied by covert informants of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). On Feb. 27, the Federal Court publicly released two “expurgated†rulings on disclosure made secretly by Justice Simon Noel last November and December in the case of Mohamed Harkat of Ottawa, who has been detained under an immigration security certificate since 2002 without knowing the full evidentiary basis for the government’s allegation that he is an al-Qaeda sleeper agent.
By SUE MONTGOMERY, The Gazette. February 21, 2009
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For the first time in four years, Adil Charkaoui, 35, was able to go outside yesterday without his mom and dad. In a judgment that Charkaoui has been awaiting for close to a year, Federal Court Judge Danièle Tremblay-Lamer yesterday lifted the restrictive conditions under which the Moroccan-born Montrealer, who Ottawa believes is a terrorist, has had to live since being released on Feb. 18, 2005, from nearly two years’ detention.
