Two more torture victims hoping for answers from Arar report

Like El Maati, he is a Canadian citizen who was arrested on a visit to Damascus. Both men suspect they were fingered by the RCMP or CSIS and believe Canadian police and security officials collaborated with their overseas captors.

"Torture is a gross crime that cannot be justifiable under any circumstances," Almalki said Tuesday. "Who did this, who was behind what happened to me? We need to have them held accountable for what they did, so that this doesn't happen to another Canadian."

O'Connor was mandated more than two years ago by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin to investigate the ordeal of Arar, a 35-year-old software engineer who then resided in Ottawa but recently moved to Kamloops, B.C.

Arar was detained by U.S. authorities in September 2002 and deported to his native Syria, even though he was a Canadian citizen and was travelling on a Canadian passport.

He says that during his year in captivity he was tortured into false confessions of links to al-Qaida, only to be released in the end and returned to Canada.

It became apparent during O'Connor's hearings that Arar's case was not unique. In fact, he had been targeted by the RCMP for surveillance as part of a broader anti-terrorist investigation that included Almalki and El Maati. None of the men has ever been charged with any crime.

The inquiry was delayed by months of wrangling over how much evidence could be made public and how much should be kept secret for national security reasons.

But O'Connor's report is now ready for release. Government and other sources say it will likely be made public Monday, the first day Parliament resumes following a three-month summer recess.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups contend that the three cases of Arar, Almalki and El Maati show a disturbing pattern in which Canadian authorities may have "contracted out" the torture of all the suspects to repressive regimes abroad.

"The evidence suggests that what happened to Maher Arar may very well have been part of something wider, something deliberate," said Alex Neve, head of Amnesty's Canadian branch.

"It defies belief to imagine this is just some strange coincidence."

Amnesty hopes O'Connor's report will shed some light on that broader pattern. But the judge will likely be limited in what he can say about the Almalki and El Maati cases, because his formal mandate was confined to the Arar affair.

Neve is lobbying for Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government to appoint a new investigator to pick up where O'Connor leaves off.

That wouldn't necessarily mean another full-blown commission of inquiry, Neve said Tuesday. But the follow-up investigation, whatever form it takes, should be "independent, transparent, comprehensive and expert."

Warren Allmand, a Liberal cabinet minister in the 1970s and 80s who now heads the Montreal-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, said the key question in all the cases is whether Canada knowingly participated in the "out-sourced torture" of its citizens.

"It is not merely a question of whether there was negligence (but) whether these shameful incidents were carried out deliberately," said Allmand.

"What does all this say about the rule of law in Canada? Can officials and intelligence officers suspend the law and the Constitution to suit their own purposes?"

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