Ismaili entrepreneur was “horrified” with allegations of links to al-Qaida, Mafia and arms dealers
Published: April 15, 2015 DAN FUMANO
VANCOUVER DESI
An Ismaili businessman from Vancouver was “horrified” to discover he had been named in online articles linking him to global terrorism, arms dealing and organized crime, court heard Tuesday in a defamation trial.
Plaintiff Altaf Nazerali, a Vancouver entrepreneur, took the stand in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver as the first witness called.
He testified on the impact of discovering, in 2011, that he had been allegedly defamed in articles posted to DeepCapture.com, a website purporting to expose financial crime and conspiracies.
“It was devastating. It was full of lies. It accused me of being a criminal, being an arms dealer, being a drug dealer, being associated with various criminal organizations ranging from the Russian mafia to the Italian mafia,” Nazerali testified.
Defendants named in the suit include the primary writer of the articles, Mark Mitchell, and Deep Capture’s publisher, Patrick Byrne.
Mitchell was in court Tuesday, observing Nazerali’s testimony and writing in a notebook. Approached outside court, Mitchell said he could not speak with The Province before the end of the trial, which is scheduled to run three weeks.
For most of the day, Nazerali’s lawyer Daniel Burnett read out excerpts from Deep Capture articles that mentioned Nazerali by name, and then asked him to respond to each statement.
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In various Deep Capture postings, court heard, Nazerali was purported to have contacted Mafia associates after a failed car-bombing (“pure fiction,” Nazerali said), to have spent time “running scams” with the head of Saudi intelligence (“not true,” Nazerali said), and to have “dabbled in arms dealing, delivering weapons to war zones in Africa.”
Asked about the last claim, Nazerali replied: “I have never been involved in arms dealing. Neither in Africa nor on the moon.”
After Nazerali first read the “outlandish” stories in August 2011, he said, he contacted Mitchell to have them removed or corrected.
Then on Sept. 9, 2011, court heard, Mitchell emailed Nazerali offering to remove his name from the website in exchange for him becoming a “source.”
Mitchell’s email, contained in earlier court filings, reads: “I do not reveal the names of my sources so if you were to become a source, I would be obliged to remove all previous mentions of your name on Deep Capture. Like I said, some facts are more interesting than others, and I’d gladly take your name out of the story altogether in exchange for having you as a source. Let me know what you think.”
In court Tuesday, Nazerali said: “In reading the email, I construed it to be an attempt at extortion, at which point, no further discussion was going to be possible on a rational basis. And then I made the tough decision to begin litigation, which is how I ended up here today after four years.”
Nazerali was raised in the Ismaili faith, a sect of Shia Islam and still practices the family’s tradition of community service which dates back to the early 1900s when his grandfather helped establish a school in Moshi, Tanzania
In the mid 1980s, the family became significant patrons of a boarding school for vocational training of girls in Bhuj, India from where the family originated before migrating to Africa in the early part of the 20th century. Nazerali’s most significant contribution came in 2002 when he and his family donated the Nazerali-Walji Building for ambulatory care services at the Aga Khan University Hospital Complex – Pakistan’s leading Medical Institution and teaching facility.
This dedicated 25,000 square foot ambulatory care building includes a nuclear medicine suite and custom designed rooms for tuberculosis patients. State-of-the-art I.T. / telemetry, and nurse call systems are also part of the project.
The family supports many other charitable institutions in the United States and Canada which are focused on improving health care, and education in economically deprived areas of the world specifically in Africa and Asia.
Rotary International named Mr. Nazerali as a Paul Harris fellow several years ago in recognition of his charitable work.
dfumano@theprovince.com
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