NEW YORK - A Syrian-born Canadian filed a lawsuit in US federal court, accusing Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top officials of deporting him to Syria in the knowledge he would be tortured.

US agents arrested Maher Arar, 33, in September, 2002 as he was transiting through New York en route to Montreal.

TORTURED Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar ponders a question about a lawsuit filed against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in Ottawa, January 22, 2004. Arar was deported to Syria as an al Qaeda suspect and said government officials knew he would be tortured in a Damascus jail. REUTERS/Jonathan Hayward/POOL .

Without notifying Ottawa, the United States deported Arar, who holds a Canadian passport, to Syria.

Arar said he was brutally tortured by the Syrians and forced to sign a false confession of terrorist complicity before being allowed in October to return to Canada.

In the suit, which names Ashcroft, Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge and FBI Director Robert Mueller among others, Arar seeks compensation, an apology and public exoneration.

The suit alleges that government officials made the decision to deport Arar to Syria, with the full knowledge of the existence of state-sponsored torture in that country, and in contravention of the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994.

"This case involves the torture and arbitrary detention of an innocent man, seized and removed on the basis of uncorroberated and incorrect information," said Barbara Olshansky, deputy legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which filed the suit on Arar's behalf.

"Federal officials deported Mr. Arar to Syria ... precisely because that country can and does use methods of interrogation that would not be legally or morally acceptable in this country," Olshansky said.

In its only statement on the case, the US Justice Department has said it has information that Arar is a member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation "and, therefore, remains a threat to national security."

Speaking by phone from Canada, Arar told reporters that he had spent 10-1/2 months in a "grave-sized cell" in Syria, during which time he was repeatedly beaten with a thick, rubber-covered electric cable.

"I was rarely allowed out of that dark, damp hole," Arar said. "The screams of my fellow inmates filled my waking hours and remain with me to this day."

Arar said he had filed the lawsuit in the hope that it would bring to account those US officials responsible for his torture.

"I have never knowingly associated with terrorists. I abhor violence of any kind. I am a family man, a husband, a father and an engineer. I am not a terrorist," he said.

Arar's deportation caused a diplomatic rift between Canada and the United States, and earlier this month both countries reached an agreement to warn each other if they plan to expel a citizen of the other to a third country.

"Like Hamlet's father's ghost, Arar will haunt Ashcroft until he gets justice," said CCR president Michael Ratner.

Copyright 2004 AFP

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