Former Guantanamo Bay detainee sues Canada for $35 million over 14-year imprisonment
A person who spent 14 years imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay is suing the Canadian authorities for $35 million for its alleged function within the collection of occasions that led as much as his detainment, throughout which he was tortured.
An announcement of declare, filed on behalf of Mohamedou Ould Slahi in the Federal Court docket of Canada on Friday, argues Canadian authorities took actions that “precipitated, contributed to and extended [his] detention, torture, assault and sexual assault at Guantanamo Bay.”
Slahi, a Mauritanian nationwide, lived in Montreal from November 1999 to January 2000, throughout which era he was investigated by safety companies. Slahi, 51, is accusing Canadian authorities of harassing him throughout their investigation, with the stress forcing him to return to Mauritania.
The core of Slahi’s declare is that Canadian authorities shared false details about his actions and in any other case contributed to occasions that ultimately led to his arrest, after which he was transported first to Jordan and Afghanistan, after which Guantanamo Bay, the place he spent 14 years imprisoned with out cost.
“Canada’s sharing of flawed intelligence sparked a vicious echo chamber,” says the assertion of declare. The go well with was first reported by the Toronto Star on Saturday.
‘Enhanced interrogation strategies’ used
The Legal professional Normal of Canada, which represents the federal government, didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon Saturday.
Throughout his detainment, Slahi wrote a number of books, together with a memoir that shaped the premise for the 2021 movie The Mauritanian. Slahi is now a writer-in-residence at a Dutch theatre.
On the time of Slahi’s arrest in 2002, officers suspected him of getting hyperlinks to terrorism, partly as a result of he prayed on the similar Montreal mosque because the tried “Millennium bomber,” Ahmed Ressam. Slahi stated he had additionally travelled twice to Afghanistan to struggle towards the Soviet-backed Afghan authorities within the early Nineteen Nineties.
U.S. interrogators, suspecting Slahi of membership in al-Qaeda, employed “enhanced interrogation strategies,” which are actually thought of torture.
“Ultimately, the torture broke him down. Slahi started to admit to the lies his interrogators put to him,” the assertion of declare reads. One of many false confessions involved a plot to explode the CN Tower in Toronto, which Slahi stated he had by no means heard of.
There have been a number of high-profile cases of compensation paid to people who had been the topics of detention or torture, to which the actions of Canadian authorities contributed. Maher Arar, for instance, obtained $10.5 million in 2007 following his detention in Syria, and the federal government settled a lawsuit from Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr for a similar quantity in 2017.
Mustafa Farooq, head of the Nationwide Council of Canadian Muslims, stated Canada’s alleged complicity within the occasions surrounding the torture of a Canadian resident stems from Islamophobic stereotypes, and that accountability is required.
“The fact is that Mr. Mohamedou was in peril partly as a result of he occurred to be praying at a mosque, the place he was on the improper place within the improper time and occurred to come back below the surveillance of the Canadian state,” Farooq stated in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“A part of the explanation that it is so horrifying is that the Canadian authorities and Canadian nationwide safety administrations participated in having a person who had executed nothing improper tortured, that [they] knew about it, and that [they] tried to ensure Canadians by no means discovered about it.”
