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Imprisoned for six years on a national-security certificate, onetime farm manager for Osama bin Laden is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week
An Egyptian who was once Osama bin Laden's farmer asked federal officials to return him to a Canadian prison, saying he could no longer handle the 24-hour surveillance the federal government has him under.
In March, Toronto resident Mohammad Zeki Mahjoub took a taxi to a federal office, complaining that constant surveillance had brought him to his breaking point. But officials told him he had committed no crime, nor had he breached a judge's order, so he had to go back home and continue living under his strict release conditions.
One of five non-citizens currently deemed a high-level threat under the terms of a federal security certificate, Mr. Mahjoub is monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
He submits to electronic monitoring inside his house, and when he leaves, federal agents follow. Jailed from 2000 to 2007, Mr. Mahjoub was released on the specific condition that he submit to these and many other measures, all intended to satisfy the state he is not endangering anybody.
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Mohammad Mahjoub, shown with his wife, Mona El Fouli, outside court in Toronto last week, submits to electronic monitoring inside his home and is followed by federal agents outside. (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)
Mr. Mahjoub was back before a judge last week, pleading for leniency. Filings, testimony and arguments before Federal Court revealed the full extent to which the state is going to keep tabs on him:
Federal agents have been surreptitiously taking photos of Mr. Mahjoub and other released ex-detainees. But sometimes the pictures have been snapped outside their children's schools or mosques, with innocent bystanders popping up in the frame.
The photos, along with every piece of mail Mr. Mahjoub and the others have received in the past two years, have been scanned and archived in a federal government database in Ottawa that analysts sift through for clues of anything suspicious.
A policy of "eyes on" tracking by federal agents is alleged to be disrupting family life and privacy to the point where Mr. Mahjoub's wife, Mona El Fouli, testified that her recent miscarriage became a matter of federal scrutiny. She said agents raised a ruckus at St. Joseph's Hospital, Toronto, after losing sight of Mr. Mahjoub - who was in the emergency room by her side. Neither the Canada Border Services Agency nor the hospital would comment.
Defence lawyer Barbara Jackman has asked a judge to order federal agents to be more covert, so as to minimize the disruption they now cause while overtly tailing Mr. Mahjoub.
The haggling over surveillance is the latest wrinkle in the conundrum that is Canada's "security-certificate" process. Closed hearings, long detentions, and proposed deportations to states that practise torture have given rise to concerns that have all but paralyzed the program's original intent.
The certificates were created so Canadian ministers could declare potentially dangerous immigrants as a threat and swiftly return them to their homeland. But a series of courtroom compromises has left armed inland border guards shadowing ex-detainees around Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Defence lawyers are concerned that the federal agency doing the monitoring, the Canada Border Services Agency, is becoming a de facto intelligence agency without sufficient oversight.
The CBSA's relationship with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is murky and appears to be a sensitive topic in Federal Court - government lawyers have raised national-security objections on at least three occasions in the past month to prevent CBSA officials from answering questions about their relationship with CSIS.
Mr. Mahjoub has never been accused of an act of terrorism. Rather, the government suggests he carried the pedigree of an al-Qaeda member to Canada when he claimed refugee status in the 1990s.
"Mr. Mahjoub testified that he did not know what al-Qaeda was and that his sole involvement was as the deputy general manager of [Osama bin Laden's] al-Damazin Farms project in Sudan," reads a 2005 decision from Federal Court Judge Eleanor Dawson. "... I find that innocent explanation to be implausible."
Regardless, the present state of affairs is that Mr. Mahjoub, who contracted hepatitis C while in prison, is sick, no longer in jail and not leaving Canada any time soon. At a downtown Starbucks in the base of a Federal Court building, he asked his wife to explain their difficulties.
"As far as we understand the court order, it's not to talk to strangers," explained Mona El Fouli, taking care not to let her husband speak directly. No one, she says, who has never been in prison can imagine what it took for her husband to ask to return.
"You could see how anxiously he wanted to get out of jail, and then he said, 'Put me back in jail,' " Ms. El Fouli said.
Her husband boiled over, she said, after an incident in which the CBSA came into the family home unannounced to supervise the installation of an Internet connection. She said every day brings a new stress that can make life difficult for them and their kids.
"He's feeling his children are getting punished," she said, adding that when her husband tried to go back to prison, he told her that as long as he lived on the outside, "they are not putting me only in jail, they are putting all of you in jail.' "
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