OLIVER MOORE

Globe and Mail Update

Wednesday, November 05 – Online Edition, Posted at 1:33 AM EST

Montrealer Maher Arar says that U.S. authorities threatened him and held him incommunicado before shipping him off to Syria, where he was beaten and tortured during a year-long imprisonment.

Speaking publicly for the first time about his experience, Mr. Arar on Tuesday described a nightmarish litany of abuse and threats at the hands of the Syrians and said that he had spent more than 10 months in a cell the size of "a grave."

He said that he was beaten on every part of his body with a frayed electrical cable and repeatedly threatened with electric-shock torture. "At the end of the [first] day, they told me tomorrow would be worse."

"The past year has been a nightmare," he told reporters in Ottawa. "What I went through is beyond human imagination."

Mr. Arar, a Syrian-born man who came to North America as a teen and took Canadian citizenship, said that he had been summoned home from vacation by his work and, using his frequent-flyer points, had flown circuitously from Tunis to Montreal via Zurich and then New York. While in New York he caught the attention of immigration officials and was questioned at length over several days.

"They asked me about what I think about [Osama] bin Laden, Palestine, Iraq and some other issues. They also asked me about the mosques I pray in, my bank account, my e-mail addresses, my relatives, about everything. This continued on and on for eight hours."

He said he was denied a lawyer in New York, was not fed for more than 24 hours, did not get a Koran until the third day and was not allowed his first phone call until five days after his arrest.

"I was very, very worried and asked for a lawyer again and again," he said, describing the early hours of his detention. "They told me I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen."

After "seven or eight" days of questioning, he said, they said that he would be deported and asked where he wanted to go. He says he chose Canada.

"They said they wanted to know why I did not want to go back to Syria. I told them I would be tortured there," Mr. Arar related Tuesday. "They told me that based on classified information, that they could not reveal to me, I would be deported to Syria. I said again that I would be tortured there."

While in New York he was visited by a Canadian consular official who assured him that his rights would be protected, but he was instead deported to the Jordanian capital of Amman, were he was met by men who were to take him to Syria.

"They blindfolded and chained me and put me in a van. They made me bend my head down, then these men started beating me. Every time I tried to talk they beat me. Every time I tried to move, I tried to talk, I tried to do anything, they beat me."

They changed cars, Mr. Arar said, and continued on to a building that turned out to be a branch of Syrian military intelligence. He spent months there without being charged, in a tiny and dark cell, urinated on by roaming cats and visited by the occasional rat.

"It was like a grave, exactly like a grave. It had no light. It was three feet wide, it was six feet deep, it was seven feet high," he described it. "I spent 10 months and 10 days in that grave."

He said that the only times he left the cell were for interrogations and for infrequent and "very frustrating" visits from Canadian consular staff, who met with him only in the presence of Syrian authorities and only after he had been warned not to say anything about his mistreatment.

After more than a year of imprisonment — during which he made several confessions that he now says were false — Mr. Arar said he was brought to a Syrian court, still without a lawyer, and listened as a prosecutor read his admission that he had trained with terrorists in Afghanistan.

"I tried to argue that I was beaten and had not gone to Afghanistan, but he did not listen," Mr. Arar said. The judicial process complete, he said he was taken to meet the head of Syrian military intelligence and a small group of Canadian diplomatic officials. His ordeal was over.

On Tuesday the soft-spoken Mr. Arar occasionally choked back tears as he spoke.

"I am not a terrorist," he said. "I am not a member of al-Qaeda and I do not know anyone who is a member of this group."