Syria releases a Canadian citizen expelled by the Americans

The Syrian authorities on Sunday released a Canadian citizen expelled to it by the USA after he had spent one year in prison.

The Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham said in a press conference in Rome that the Syrian authorities handed over Maher Arar on Sunday to one of the employees at the Canadian consulate in Damascus.

The Canadian minister indicated that Arar is on his way to Canada and was due to have reached Ottawa yesterday ( Monday) evening, adding that he had received on Saturday a telephone call from the Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Shara who notified him about this decision.

Canadian officials stressed that Arar who did not return back to Syria since he arrived in Canada in 1988 would have been tried in Damascus over being suspected of links to what is called terrorism.

Arar ( 32 year old) and an IT engineer and carried both the Syrian and Canadian nationalities, was detained at Kennedy airport in New York on September 26th, 2002 when he was waiting for his flight to Montreal on his way back from Tunisia.

He was expelled by the American authorities to Syria, his birthplace, although he was traveling under a Canadian passport after he was suspected of belonging to al-Qaida organization.

The US Secretary Of State Colin Powell then stressed to his Canadian counterpart that the US handed over Arar to Syria, according to information handed over by Canadian intelligence circles.

After that, the local papers disclosed that Arar was under the control of the Canadian royal police ( federal police ) for more than one year before he was expelled by the USA to Syria.

Manya Mazyagjh, wife of Arar, who got the support of the Amnesty International in her campaign to release her father promised she will exert all efforts to clarify the implications of this "nightmare."