By Janet Richards

BELLEVILLE, ONTARIO – Three Canadian Muslim men who suffered torture in Syria and Egypt were in Belleville May 6 to talk about their experience and their move to initiate a public inquiry into their torture.

A small crowd gathered at Christ Church on Everett Street May 6 to listen to the stories of three men who are travelling from Toronto to Ottawa raising awareness and support for the Caravan Against Canadian Involvement in Torture.

Matthew Behrens of Homes not Bombs said that when you are walking through communities dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, as the caravan has been, “it hits people.”

Using documentation from the widely publicized 2006 Arar Commission Report into the deportation, detention and torture of Canadian Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki shared the story of his own torture in Syria over a period of 22 months and seven days.

Almalki, a father of six with an engineering degree from the University of Ottawa, is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in Syria on the way to visit his ailing grandmother. He has never been charged with any crime in Canada or had an arrest warrant issued against him, nor has any evidence of criminal behaviour ever been produced.

He said following 9/11 he and his family were harassed by the RCMP, including having every package sent to his business opened by customs, unmarked cars following him and his wife, and a camera installed across the street from their home. Family and friends were also questioned.

The harassment became “too much” when he and his wife took a trip to Malaysia to visit her family in 2001, and he was detained and questioned in Malaysia for several hours before being cleared of any wrongdoing.

When he was detained in Syria in 2002, Almalki’s family was told it was based on “information from abroad.”

Almalki described the “inhumane” conditions he endured for most of his time in Syria and explained some of the torture methods he was subjected to, which included being whipped with electrical cable for hours at a time. The majority of his time was spent in a cell smaller than a grave.

“They want you to give them something, but if you don’t give them something they keep torturing you,” Almalki said, adding a Syrian official later told him, “we beat you until we got convinced you had nothing.”

It was two months before he was taken outside for the first time, a day that Almalki said he “found for the first time in life how beautiful the sky was.”

. . . CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL STORY .

Short URL: http://tinyurl.com/yl8st8d