The El Maati file
Ahmad El Maati was "one of the main targets" of a counterterrorism investigation that began in 2001 and continues to this day, RCMP Superintendent Mike Cabana testified earlier this month at the Arar inquiry.
Police were curious about Mr. El Maati's flight lessons, the fact he drove a tractor-trailer, a suspicious map once found in his rig, his time in Afghanistan with the mujahedeen, and his fugitive terror-suspect brother.
This led security agents to materialize at his door within hours of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Yet the 40-year-old truck driver, who has never been charged with any crime in Canada, insists he is no terrorist -- even if he has paid a price for the suspicion that he is one.
Breaking years of silence, Mr. El Maati gives explanations for a number of past events:
Afghan training camps: Mr. El Maati admits to training in Afghanistan, but says he only learned how to fire AK-47 rifles, and that his bad knee kept him from doing much of anything. Witnesses have placed him in either the Khalden or Deronta camps, where some mujahedeen have said they took courses including bomb-making and chemical attacks. He denies training there, saying he was at Khost camp.
His brother, the fugitive: Amr El Maati's image can be found on the Federal Bureau of Investigation website. FBI officials describe him as an "armed and dangerous" fugitive.
Amr El Maati's Canadian citizenship papers were found in an al-Qaeda safe house in 2001. But Ahmad El Maati says he hasn't seen his brother in years.
The Khadr connection: Like many other Canadians who have been accused of involvement in terrorism, Ahmad El Maati knew the notorious Ahmed Said Khadr -- the charity worker known in Taliban-era Afghanistan as "al-Kanadi," or "the Canadian." Mr. El Maati says he met Mr. Kahdr once -- at the bakery owned by Mr. Kadhr's father-in-law where Mr. El Maati once worked.
Before being killed in Pakistan in 2003, Mr. Khadr befriended Osama bin Laden and had his Canadian-born children tutored in Afghan training camps.
The strange site map: After returning to Canada in the mid-1990s to work as a truck driver, Mr. El Maati was stopped at the Canadian-U.S. border in August, 2001. U.S. guards pulled a schematic map of Ottawa out of his rig. It marked various government buildings.
For eight hours, guards questioned him, before letting him go.
The map kept coming back to haunt Mr. El Maati. Canadian agents wanted to know about it when they visited him on Sept. 11, 2001. Syrian agents, who, he says, got the copy from the RCMP, beat him as they asked him about it.
Mr. El Maati says that because of the map, the Syrians made him falsely confess to a plot involving targets in Ottawa. Yet he has always said the map was never his and he has recanted the confession. -- Colin Freeze
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050829/ELMAATI29/TPBusiness/TopStories/?pageRequested=4