Less than a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Canadian High Commission officials in Pakistan helped an al-Qaeda terrorism suspect replace his confiscated Canadian travel documents -- a decision that is making it difficult for the suspect's son to get a passport today. Abdurahman Khadr, a 21-year-old Torontonian who says he has renounced his late father's militant brand of Islamic extremism, has launched a Federal Court action to get a Canadian passport -- a document that Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham is denying him on security grounds.
| I mean, just because everyone else in the family is a terrorist, doesn't mean he is. |
Documents newly made public because of that court case reveal that these concerns are based, in part, on the fact that Mr. Khadr's father, Ahmed Said Khadr, repeatedly approached the High Commission in Islamabad to ask for help in getting back his own travel documents after Pakistani guards seized them from him and his wife, Maha Elsamnah, when they crossed over from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan late in 2000. The elder Mr. Khadr described himself as a charity worker, even though he was later described as an associate of Osama bin Laden. On Jan. 25, 2001, the United Nations Security Council decreed that Mr. Khadr's assets must be frozen as part of a global clampdown on al-Qaeda. Soon after, he became a fugitive. He was killed by Pakistani forces in a raid against Islamic militants last fall. |