Maher Arar report concludes in his favor

The public inquiry into Maher Arar's case is finally out.

Maher Arar is a Canadian Syrian engineer. After spending a vacation in Tunisia (where his wife is from), he was travelling from Tunisia to Zurich to New York to Canada on Sept 26, 2002. On his stop in New York he was detained by US authorities and taken to Syria, via Jordan. There he was interrogated and tortured for more than a year, and then freed with no charges.

An inquiry was held to investigate the role of Canadian authorities, in his being detained by the Americans and being sent to Syria.

The findings are overwhelmingly in his favor:

• Maher Arar is not linked to the 9/11 militants.
• He was tortured in Syria.
• Canadian agencies wrongly accepted information from Syrian sources about Arar after his detention, without determining whether it might have been extracted using torture.
• In order to protect themselves and portray Arar in an unflattering light, Canadian officials leaked inaccurate details about Arar to news media.
• Officials from the RCMP gave a sanitized summary of the Arar case to top government officials in order to cover up the RCMP mistake.

Resources

• Wikipedia page on Maher Arar.
• The Arar commission web site.
• CBC In Depth on Maher Arar.
• BBC article.