Held for weeks under a secretive law, Ontario cabbie seeks help clearing name
The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, April 25, 2006
COLIN FREEZE AND SONYA FATAH
TORONTO — After a mystifying detention under a secretive law, a Pakistani refugee claimant was ordered freed on bail yesterday — five weeks after his case generated fears of terrorism in a Toronto suburb.
Public Safety Department officials, who had been holding Raja Ghulam Murtaza since mid-March, told a tribunal yesterday they no longer considered the 40-year-old taxi driver from Newmarket, Ont., to be any threat.
“The minister is not seeking detention,” government representative Edith Ishmael-Decaire told an adjudicator yesterday, reversing the government’s previous position that Mr. Murtaza was a threat to Canada’s security.
Mr. Murtaza should be freed on $10,000 bail by early today. More mundane concerns about the truth of his two-year-old refugee case still hang, but he has been effectively downgraded from a possible terrorism suspect to someone who could have misrepresented himself on his asylum application.
While in detention, he told a reporter that the terrorism allegations were “ridiculous” and that he fled Pakistan for the United States in 1997. Mr. Murtaza has also said that he lived in Houston with his wife, from whom he is now separated, and children, but headed to Canada three years ago to make an asylum claim here after his U.S. claim failed.
His Toronto girlfriend attended a hearing yesterday and urged reporters to rehabilitate Mr. Murtaza’s reputation. “We need help in clearing his name,” said Rose Bertuman, who has dated the cabbie for nearly two years.
No official explanation for the arrest has been revealed, apart from the fact that police invoked a law that allows non-citizens to be jailed. If Canada’s Minister of Public Safety feels there are “reasonable suspicions,” non-citizens can be jailed as terrorists, war criminals or other significant threats.
This power, and the low legal threshold used to trigger it, is controversial. “This is pre-emptive detention,” University of Toronto law professor Audrey Macklin said. “Imagine the kind of power this gives to the state: ‘We’re going to lock you up until we find a reason to lock you up.’ ”
Police had initially believed Mr. Murtaza was linked to a Kashmiri separatist group that’s banned in Canada for ties to terrorism. Mr. Murtaza’s girlfriend said the RCMP asked her whether he had links to the group, but suggested allegations that he was connected to terrorism were false.
The Canadian government has always kept mum about the case, and news of Mr. Murtaza’s alleged links to terrorism broke only because of leaked information. His apparent vindication would have been kept secret too, had lawyers for the media not fought to open up yesterday’s hearing.
Adrienne Lee, a lawyer for The Globe and Mail, said the Public Safety Ministry asked to close the hearing without giving any reasons.
Transcripts from previous detention reviews remain off-limits to the press for the time being, although media lawyers are fighting to obtain them. And authorities have also refused to comment on the whereabouts of a man reportedly taken into custody with Mr. Murtaza.
The section of the Immigration Act that allows the detention of non-citizens suspected of being terror threats was introduced in 2001. Immigration officials say they don’t use the power often.
Three years ago, in an ill-fated police investigation known as Project Thread, the RCMP and federal authorities rounded up nearly 20 Pakistani men and held them by stating they could be terrorists.
Within days, it became clear that police had built a highly circumstantial case. In public hearings, representatives for the men said the purported links to terrorism were “garbage” and adjudicators agreed. Ultimately, the men were deported for being part of a visa scam.
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