Israel releases former University of Toronto professor

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Speaking Sunday from his brother's home near Nazareth and with the sound of fireworks being set off by villagers to celebrate Falah's return in the background Falah described his arrest and subsequent detention.

He arrived in Israel July 5 on a flight from Toronto, where Falah lived for more than eight years and once taught at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. Now a geography professor at Akron University in Ohio, he was flying to Israel to be with his mother, who was about to undergo an operation in the northern city of Haifa.

On July 8 he decided to visit an old classmate he hadn't seen for 16 years who lives in Ras al-Nakura, a village situated on the Israeli-Lebanese border along the Mediterranean, he said.

Falah, founder of the Arab World Geographer journal and whose geographic work of the Middle East has been widely published, had visited the area from the Lebanese side a month earlier and as he said he always does when he finds interesting landscapes took pictures of the area.

When he had the opportunity on July 8 to take pictures of the same area from the Israeli side, he grabbed it, he said. He saw signs warning of a military base but didn't take any pictures of those, he said.

There was a giant antenna in one of the pictures, Falah said, but he didn't know it was part of the military base, a fact he would later find out from Israeli authorities.

"(The antenna is) so high in the landscape, it appears in any photograph," Falah said.

After he took the photos, a man who identified himself as a security officer asked why Falah was taking pictures. Falah explained his geographic interests, he said, and the officer let him go.

When Falah came back along the same road an hour and a half later after visiting his friend, a police officer stopped him after identifying Falah as the man who was taking pictures earlier. The officer called for backup, and Falah was taken to jail.

"They said `You were spying,' and they took the camera," he said. "At that point I noticed there was an antenna in one of the photographs I had. And then (there was) a whole interrogation on the antenna."

They repeated the same accusations throughout his detention, he said, at one point bringing up Falah's visit to Iran three years ago, where Falah said he attended a geography conference with two other Canadian professors and Alex Murphy, a past president of the Association of American Geographers.

Falah said he was interrogated for 60 hours without being allowed to sleep, the only significant break coming after 40 hours of questioning when he was allowed to go to his underground cell for 20 minutes. But for the rest of the arduous interrogation, he said, he sat with his hands tied behind his back, getting the odd short break to eat or go to the bathroom.

He was also verbally abused so severely that it bordered on sexual harassment, Falah said, though he didn't want to specify what was said, only to say it hurt his dignity.

His lawyer, who Falah only met for the first time on Wednesday 18 days after his arrest is looking over the case, Falah said.

"If there is basis with it, we will go ahead (with a lawsuit)," he said.

Falah said he was released because the 22-day maximum for holding a prisoner without charges had expired. He said the officers apologized and told him the latest Middle East violence was partly to blame for his extended detention.

Falah said he never met with a Canadian government official during his detention, though he said his lawyer had been in touch with Canadian embassy staff in Tel Aviv.

"In the 22 days I was in jail, I think the Canadian government could at least have come to talk to me," he said. "If they were more aggressively involved, I don't think (Israel) would have held me for 22 days."

Foreign Affairs spokesman Rodney Moore said he hadn't heard Falah's description of his detention. He couldn't comment on what, if any, action the Canadian government would take following Falah's statements.

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