Arrest
On October 19, 2001, Almrei was brought to his lawyer's office for a CSIS interview; where he again reiterated his travels and denied having ever been to Sudan, Afghanistan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Dagestan or Chechnya. He was also confronted with the fact that photographs of Ibn Khattab, Osama bin Laden and Mohammad Atta were found on his computer, though he protested that agents were taking them out of context and had simply been photos from news agencies such as BBC which were included in online stories he had read, and were saved in his web cache. He was arrested on a security certificate nevertheless, and the following month judge Danièle Tremblay-Lamer found the certificate "reasonable". On November 10, 2002 he retracted part of his statement and said that he had worked as an Imam in Afghanistan but worried that in the wake of the terrorist attacks the truth would be incriminating. He also said that he had been tasked to run a girls' school in Tajikstan by Al Haramin.
While at the Toronto West Detention Centre, he staged two hunger strikes - a 39-day fast that succeeded in ensuring winter clothing and shoes in his cell during the winter, and a 73-day fast calling for an hour of exercise per day. During the first strike, guards at the prison had offered to slip him some shoes against the rules, but he refused and said he would wait until the court ruled he was legally entitled to them.
In 2003, Almrei, who volunteered as a janitor in the prison, witnessed a prison guard being assaulted by an inmate and intervened, helping to pull the attacker off the officer and then hitting an emergency button to call other guards to assist. Subsequently, he carries a stigma and requested he be allowed to remain in solitary confinement rather than released into the general prison population, as he maintained the guards were his "friends".
In 2005 he mentioned that he'd lost respect for his friend Al Kaysee, who had remained friends up until the day of Almrei's arrest, and since then had not even asked mutual friends how he was faring, muchless visited him in prison. He spent most of his time in prison watching the CPAC Parliamentary channel, and said he did not harbour a grudge against Canada for his treatment since he came from Saudi Arabia and Syria which have even fewer human rights.
In April 2006, he was moved to a new detention facility at Millhaven Institution, specifically meant to house those held under security certificates.
Read more about this topic: Hassan Almrei
Famous quotes containing the word arrest:
“Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cain’s race invented be,
And blest Seth vexed us with Astronomie.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)