TORONTO — More than nine weeks after Hassan Almrei was freed by a judge who excoriated Canada’s spy agency for continuing to pursue him, he has yet to hear anything — let alone the apology he craves — from federal security officials.
Speaking publicly for the first time since an electronic tracking bracelet was sliced off his ankle, Almrei said he wants the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to tell the world he’s not a terrorist.
“I’d be very happy if they acknowledged they made mistakes in my case, and they said, ’We were wrong,”’ Almrei told The Canadian Press in an interview.
“It’s a dream of mine to have them come and say, ’Yes, we were wrong, we were wrong.”’
In mid-December, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley struck down a national security certificate against the Syrian-born man arrested eight years earlier on terror suspicions.
The ruling ended Almrei’s ordeal and delivered the latest blow to an already wobbly security-certificate law.
Almrei came to Canada in January 1999 on a false United Arab Emirates passport and attained refugee status the following year.
Mosley said there were reasonable grounds to believe Almrei was a security danger when detained in October 2001, just after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, but there was no reason to cling to that belief today.
The government had argued Almrei’s travel, activities and involvement with false documents were consistent with supporters of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.
The judge criticized CSIS for presenting a dated view to the court without considering whether knowledge about the risk from Islamic extremists had evolved since Almrei was taken into custody in the frantic days following 9-11.
In early 2009, Almrei was released from a high-security prison near Kingston, Ont., but remained under the close supervision.