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|Deported Iranian admits he lied |

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|Stewart Bell |

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|National Post |

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|Saturday, September 13, 2003 |

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|CREDIT: Jonathan Hayward, The Canadian Press |

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|Family and friends of secret trial detainees who are facing possible deportation protest in Ottawa last month. |

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|CREDIT: Ivan Sahar Media Guide Centre, National Post |

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|Mansour Ahani gained the support of human rights activists with his tale that he would be tortured if he was deported to Iran. |

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|The deportation of Mansour Ahani was, in the end, remarkably swift. On the night of June 18, 2002, immigration officers escorted the Iranian, |

|deemed a security threat to Canada, from his jail cell in Hamilton to a chartered plane for the flight home to Tehran. |

|But it had taken nine years of epic legal battles to get him on that jet. Backed by refugee and human-rights lobby groups, Ahani fought his |

|deportation in appeal after appeal, eventually before the Supreme Court of Canada. |

|Describing himself as a defector from the Iranian intelligence service, he argued he knew secrets the Islamic republic would not want divulged. |

|In his refugee claim, he wrote: "I am dead if I return." His Toronto lawyer said he faced "summary execution." The rallying cry of his |

|supporters became Deportation Equals Death Sentence. Since returning to Iran, activists assert, Ahani has disappeared. |

|They are wrong. |

|Ahani has not disappeared, nor has he been killed, nor is he imprisoned. He lives with his parents and siblings in a two-storey house in the |

|Naziabad neighbourhood of southern Tehran, where he grew up. |

|In his first interview since being deported, Ahani, 38, admitted the claims that got him refugee status in Canada -- that he was a defector from|

|the Iranian intelligence ministry who would be killed if sent back to Iran -- were false. He said they were part of a story invented by the |

|smugglers he paid to bring him to Vancouver. It was apparent he was neither dead nor imprisoned, as he and his supporters had said he would be. |

|"He is now quite safe and sound," said A.R. Chabokrow, managing director of the Ivan Sahar Media Guide Centre, a Tehran company that interviewed|

|Ahani for the National Post. |

|(The Iranian government would not grant a travel visa to the Post for this story. The newspaper instead hired a local reporter to interview |

|Ahani and record answers to questions supplied by the Post. This account is based on transcripts of his comments.) |

|Ahani's case touches on an issue that is central to Canadian immigration and anti-terrorism policies. Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, |

|there is a growing backlash against federal counterterror measures, especially security certificates used to deport terror suspects. Refugee |

|activists want Canada to "stop the deportations," which they call a form of capital punishment. |

|But they are hard-pressed to come up with examples of deportees who have wound up dead. In the absence of concrete cases, Ahani is increasingly |

|cited as an example of a deportation gone bad. |

|Ahani may be only one of thousands of migrants sent home each year, but he was the test case, whose fears of deportation took him to the Supreme|

|Court of Canada and led to changes in Canadian immigration policies. If Ahani can be deported to Iran without harm, are the scare stories of the|

|refugee lobby overblown? |

|- - - |

|Ahani walked off a flight from Seoul at Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14, 1991. He had destroyed his fake Greek passport during the |

|flight. He made a refugee claim in which he said he had been beaten with a strap by Iran's revolutionary guard, although the immigration officer|

|noted the 81 lashes he said he received had somehow left no scars. |

|To support his claim, he wrote a three-page letter describing his military service in Iran, alleging he had been sent to Pakistan on a secret |

|mission to blow up the home of a leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, an exiled Iranian opposition group. He said he refused to take part in|

|the attack and was arrested. |

|He was later recruited into the foreign assassinations branch of the Foreign Ministry, he said, but fled Tehran and went to Dubai by boat and |

|then flew to Canada. "I have escaped them and if I were to be returned to Iran now there would be no second opportunity," he wrote. |

|"They know I do not hold the same beliefs as them and that I have a great deal of knowledge concerning their operations and people. I am dead if|

|I return and hope my claim for refugee status will be taken very seriously." |

|Ahani now says the defection story was a fabrication. When he decided to come to Canada, he approached the MEK for help and paid them US$5,000, |

|he said. "I chose the MEK as they had a better relation with the immigration office as well as with the governmental office," he said. "After |

|receiving the money, they plotted a scenario for me to present at the court," he said. |

|He attended their meetings and signed their petitions but said he was forced to and does not support their politics. "I have never ever been a |

|political activist and I know nothing about politics, but I had to act and talk in accordance with the scenario they had plotted for me. I had |

|to act it out so naturally as if I had been a victim about to be executed, who had rushed out of his country and now is seeking asylum in |

|Canada, and this was exactly the task I fulfilled. |

|"According to the plot the MEK had sold to me, I was one of the intelligence forces of the regime in their attack to MEK headquarters in |

|Pakistan, but as I had refused to take part in the attack, when we returned to Iran, I got arrested and after spending some time in prison I had|

|managed to escape and come to Canada and appeal for political asylum because of fearing to lose my life." |

|The ruse worked. "I was acting so natural that I managed to convince the court and without any serious problems I obtained my political asylum."|

|He lived initially in Vancouver but then took a bus across Canada to Toronto. He had trouble finding work. He delivered advertising flyers and |

|took English classes but "nobody was willing to offer jobs to foreigners. There was a dominant racist atmosphere." |

|He says he decided to move to Europe. His family, however, wanted him to return to Iran, and asked a former neighbour named Akbar Khoshkooshk to|

|talk him into coming home to Tehran, he said. "I had no idea what his job was," Ahani said. |

|According to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Khoshkooshk's job was to co-ordinate attacks on Iranian dissidents living |

|abroad. He was a commander in the Iranian intelligence service, MOIS, charged with eliminating perceived threats to Iran's Islamic revolution. |

|Khoshkooshk wired money to a foreign exchange firm in Toronto and told Ahani to meet him in Switzerland. Ahani used $900 of it to buy a fake |

|passport in the name of Paolo Gomez. |

|They met in a wooded area of Zurich in May, 1992. Khoshkooshk asked Ahani to go with him to Italy. They travelled on separate trains. "We went |

|to Urbino and booked a room, the very fact that later turned out to be understood as plotting an assassination," Ahani said. |

|The next day, they took a bus together to Fermignano, where Khoshkooshk gave Ahani a camera and had him take photos of certain buildings. But if|

|they were planning an assassination, as authorities believe, it never happened. Italian police moved in and arrested the pair. Ahani was |

|released after several hours and left for Turkey, where he went to the Iranian embassy and delivered the camera. |

|He returned to Canada using another fake passport and was working at Burger King in Toronto when two CSIS agents arrived unannounced and asked |

|to speak to him. "And that," Ahani said, "was the starting point of all my troubles." |

|The agents took Ahani to a hotel in Toronto and interviewed him at length. Ahani said they threatened him. "They tried to make me realize that |

|my destiny was in their hands; they could easily annihilate my family or promote the condition that I was in, like offering me a better job such|

|as working in a luxurious hotel, or provide me with a permanent Canadian residence." He said the agents offered him $1,500, but he would not |

|take it. |

|Ahani's next meeting with the agents lasted from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. "They insisted that if I did not co- operate with them I would surely be in |

|fatal trouble," he said, "and at the same time they were promising me a very prosperous future in Canada." |

|(CSIS called Ahani's allegations self-serving and false. "CSIS is legally mandated with the collection and analysis of information relating to |

|national security issues, and its representatives do so in a lawful, non-threatening manner," said Nicole Courier, the agency's spokeswoman.) |

|The CSIS agents tell a different version of the interviews. They said Ahani tried to appear co-operative but fed them false information. He also|

|professed his loyalty to Khoshkooshk, his love of Iran and his strong Islamic convictions, they said. |

|At one point, agents took Ahani to a hotel for "eight or nine days," he said. They interrogated him and he killed time watching feature films on|

|television. They told him the reason he was there was that Salman Rushdie was visiting Toronto and they wanted to avoid any risks to his life. |

|The CSIS agents suspected that Ahani did indeed participate in the attack in Pakistan, but they doubted he had defected from the Iranian |

|military, as he claimed. They also believed he knew he had been summoned to Europe to assassinate a dissident. He had detailed knowledge about |

|Iranian security agencies and about the murders of two Iranian dissidents, right down to the types of weapons and methods used. CSIS concluded |

|he was a member of MOIS. |

|On June 17, 1993, RCMP officers arrested Ahani as a threat to national security. "It was like one of these police stories, one of these |

|Hollywood films," he said. "They were carrying machine guns, they blocked all the roads and set the scene in a way as if they were going to |

|arrest a famous terrorist." |

|Ahani does not like the way he was portrayed in newspapers, although his case got little media coverage until some five years after his arrest. |

|Ahani claims the press "created a foul and loathsome image" of him in order to entertain the bored Canadian public. "They had created something |

|quite similar to gladiator fights to amuse the public who were tired of their routine life," he said. |

|A Federal Court judge, however, upheld his deportation, ruling that "most if not all of the [CSIS] allegations against the respondent were |

|established." But Ahani repeatedly appealed to the courts, further delaying his departure. |

|He says he lost 32 pounds while he waited in jail for nine years for the outcome of his appeals. His wife lost a child and left him. He says he |

|was beaten by inmates at Don Jail, who broke his nose three times. Drugs flowed freely in the jail and were "sold under the control of the |

|prison guards," he said. He claimed he was "beaten up" by the guards three times. |

|Ahani lost all his appeals and at last took his case to the Supreme Court of Canada. He argued he could not be deported to Iran because he would|

|be tortured and killed. Lobby groups rallied behind him and intervened in the case on his behalf. (His case was argued together with that of a |

|terrorist facing deportation, Manickavasagam Suresh, the Canadian leader of the Tamil Tigers.) |

|The court ruled on Jan. 11, 2002, that the federal government could not deport even terrorists to their homelands if there was a "substantial" |

|risk they would be tortured. To do so would violate the terrorists' constitutional guarantee of life, liberty and security, it said. |

|But the court ruled Ahani could be deported because he posed a threat to Canadians and had failed to convince the court deportation would put |

|his safety at risk. "The Supreme Court passed my final verdict," he said. |

|Instead of removing Ahani at once, the government gave him a 72-hour reprieve, during which his lawyer went to the Ontario Court of Appeal and |

|got an injunction stopping his deportation while he made a further appeal. |

|In June, 2002, his appeals were finally exhausted. He was sent home. When the charter jet landed in Tehran, RCMP and immigration officers handed|

|him over to Iranian immigration officials. Amnesty International said in its 2003 annual report Ahani was "reportedly briefly detained upon his |

|return to Iran and has not been heard from since." |

|Ahani lives now with his parents in a dilapidated old house with a rusty metal doorway. Each room is occupied by a family. His father works in a|

|brickyard. During the interviews, Ahani's younger brother exercised in a corner of the yard. Ahani complained he has to rely on his parents for |

|money. |

|"I came back to my country as a person who had lost everything," he said. "I had left home many years ago to find a job and support my parents. |

|Now that I have no job, no skills, no health, I have to ask them to support me. The only achievement I have achieved from my trip to Canada is |

|the cold sigh of an innocent." |

|But Ahani did manage one remarkable achievement: By clinging to a story he now admits was a hoax, he fended off deportation for almost a decade |

|and became a cause célèbre for refugee and human-rights activists, who still use his case as an example of Canada's injustice to migrants. |

|The killing of Zahra Kazemi, the Canadian photojournalist beaten to death while in custody in Tehran, shows that Iran does indeed mistreat those|

|it deems a threat to its harsh rule. But unlike Ahani, Kazemi was not a deportee, nor was she an Iranian intelligence operative. |

|Citizenship and Immigration Canada deports about 9,000 migrants every year. Before being sent home, each one has the right to request a |

|Pre-removal Risk Assessment, which weighs whether they might be in danger in their homeland. |

|Immigration officials cannot say with certainty how many deportees end up dead or tortured, but they said it is virtually unheard of. "As far as|

|we know, it's not something that happens very often," said Simone McAndrew, a spokeswoman for the agency. |

|Asked if she knew how many migrants deported from Canada end up being tortured or killed, Janet Dench of the Canadian Council for Refugees, |

|agreed: "Not very many that have been well-documented." |

|"Speaking for myself, I've spoken to many people who feared the worst when they were returned, but I never heard what happened. Maybe they were |

|tortured, maybe they weren't." |

|Or maybe, like Ahani, they just went home. |

|sbell@ |

|© Copyright  2003 National Post |

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