Early Life
The family moved to Beirut, and both Amer and his brother were enrolled in a Catholic school. Amer immigrated to Montreal in 1981 with his father and brother, until his mother and sister arrived and the family moved to Toronto where he attended high school, before returning to Montreal for University.
According to the interrogation of Abdullah Khadr in Pakistan, el-Maati had worked as a carpet salesman after the Mujahideen had denied him a pension due to his 1992 brain injury following a car accident which prevented him from participating in long treks.
In 1996, Amer travelled to Surobi, to find his younger brother who had spent four years fighting alongside Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against the Taliban. The pair retreated north with Hekmatyar's forces, and then Ahmad went to Tehran to visit their mother and sister, while Amer traveled to Peshawar where he began working for the NGO Health and Education Projects International, created by Ahmed Khadr.
In 1998 he obtained a Canadian passport while living in Pakistan. Khadr's son Abdurahman testified in Montreal in the summer of 2004 that el-Maati had given his Canadian passport to a man known as Idriss.
His family claims to have last seen him in 1999, and to have received only a single e-Mail from him the following year, showing photographs of the school where he was working for the Canadian Relief Foundation.
Read more about this topic: Amer El-Maati
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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