`I don't want to live with the lie anymore' - Khadr says he's an Al Qaeda recruit turned informant
Mar. 5, 2004. 01:00 AM
CBC NEWSWORLD
Twenty-one-year-old Scarborough resident, Abdurahman Khadr, tells CBC documentary about his links to Al Queda terrorist network.
`I don't want to live with the lie anymore'
Khadr says he's an Al Qaeda recruit turned informant
Claims the CIA sent him to Bosnia to spy on fighters
MICHELLE SHEPHARD
STAFF REPORTER
Abdurahman Khadr is walking through a crowd in the heart of Toronto. It's the corner of Dundas and Yonge Sts. and he's moving quickly, talking about his teenage brother who is paralyzed by a bullet and recovering in a Pakistani hospital.
He's just a kid, he keeps saying, his eyes welling up. He needs to come home, he says.
Then he stops short and smiles, revealing the gap where his front two teeth have fallen out. He looks up and starts laughing.
"You gotta love that guy," he says, pointing to a huge television screen suspended above the Hard Rock Cafe a block away. Actor Adam Sandler fills the screen.
"I love every movie he's in. He's hilarious."
This is how the 21-year-old Scarborough resident, who speaks as nonchalantly about growing up with Osama bin Laden as he does about the latest Hollywood blockbuster, ends a recent interview.
But this was before Abdurahman admitted this week he had repeatedly lied to the Canadian public following his release late last year from a U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He revealed in a two-part CBC television documentary that ended last night, that his father Ahmed Said Khadr tried to raise him to be an Al Qaeda suicide bomber; that he spent years, not just three months, learning about weapons in Afghan training camps; and that he was able to walk away from it all by agreeing to work as an informant for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
It was a far different story than the one he told during a press conference the day after he returned to Canada last year, after his Egyptian-born fatherhad been killed and his youngest brother shot and paralyzed in a battle with Pakistani troops.
"The way I know my father, he didn't have anything to do with Al Qaeda or any of those things," Khadr told reporters on Dec. 1.
Abdurahman also lambasted the Canadian government at the press conference for not helping him return to Canada. He claimed he was turned away from embassies in Pakistan and Turkey as he tried to make his way back to Canada, after being dumped in Afghanistan by American authorities without identification or money.
Abdurahman now says that after he was first arrested, he was kept in a CIA safehouse in Kabul and eventually taken to Guantanamo Bay, after his "favourite" CIA agent suggested he become a spy at the Cuba detention camp.
After his release he was given a false passport and taken to Bosnia-Herzegovina. His mission, he said, was to infiltrate Al Qaeda members in Bosnia who planned to fight in Iraq.
He met one man the CIA believed was an Al Qaeda recruiter in a mosque in Bosnia.
"They put me in a beautiful place in Cuba but I was staying there alone. Then I was in a hotel in Sarajevo, again alone ... I'm not the kind of person to like being alone. I love to socialize and I started thinking this was going to be my life," he said yesterday in an interview.
"The CIA just wanted me to get information ... they said they'd pay me, but I said I don't want to live that life anymore."
He said there was also the risk he would get shot, so he quit.
He says he concocted the cover story about being dumped in Afghanistan without money or a passport after his release from U.S. detention with the CIA. He then contacted his grandmother in Canada. CIA agents in Sarajevo took Khadr to the Canadian embassy and he was flown home.
At the end of December he also lied when interviewed for a Star story that revealed he was released from the camp in Cuba because he had made a deal with the Americans to spy.
"There was no deal," he insisted at the time.
Hussein Hamdani, a Burlington lawyer who has advised Abdurahman for months, said that by coming forward with his story he has put his life at risk.
"He really can't leave Canada. I don't think it would be safe to travel to any other country," he said yesterday. "He has made no material benefit by coming out and speaking the truth right now. He's only doing it because he needed to clear his mind and the burden of lying to the Canadian public the first time around was too overwhelming."
He signed an agreement with the CBC, Hamdani added, not to tell his story to anyone until the documentary aired.
When asked in an interview yesterday why people should now believe him when he has admitted to lying in the past, he said because he's "speaking the truth" now.
"I can't force anybody to believe me, but I don't want to live with the lie anymore. I can't lie to myself, to my family, to the people in the media. I can't.
"I'm sorry to have lied."
Abdurahman agreed to a polygraph test arranged by the CBC and he passed, the network said.
These claims — from the admissions of his mother and sister that the Sept. 11 attacks gave the U.S. "what they deserve" and that they were proud their father died as a martyr, to Abdurahman's revelation that he worked for the U.S. to spy on Al Qaeda — are sure to tear the Khadr family apart.
"I know there's going to be people after me, my family's going to hate me. Why do you think I'd do all this if it's just a lie. Would I just make up a lie like this so I can have another, you know, 10 or 20 people from Al Qaeda hunting me?" Abdurahman told CBC.
His sister Zaynab said from her home near Islamabad during the documentary that she would be "ashamed" of Abdurahman if he worked for the U.S.
Zaynab and her mother Maha Elsamna have said they want to come home, bringing the youngest son, Abdul Karim, 14, with them to get Canadian medical treatment. All three are Canadian citizens.
Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Kimberly Phillips said the family has a "constitutional right" to return to Canada, but because some members have lost passports in the past, they are not entitled to passports that would allow them to travel anywhere in the world.
"In light of their self-admitted terrorist activities and history of irregular passport care, we have offered the family emergency passports which will allow them to return to Canada," she said.
Asked where he'll go from here Abdurahman says he just wants to "get back to a normal life."
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