OTTAWA -- Amnesty International asked Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan nine months ago to investigate possible federal complicity in the Syrian interrogation and torture of Abdullah Almalki, an Ottawa businessman, but the minister has not yet responded to the human-rights group. "It is regrettable that correspondence on a range of issues sometimes takes as long as it does to get through the system," Alex Swann, a spokesman for Ms. McLellan, said yesterday, denying the delay was a way to avoid a controversy.
Ms. McLellan "will be responding soon" on the basis of the most current information about the Almalki case, Mr. Swann said without being more precise.Mr. Almalki, 34, was arrested when he returned to Syria on a family visit in 2002 and held for two years.
He says he was repeatedly tortured and interrogated by Syrian military intelligence officers who had information that he believes could only have come from Canadian authorities.
Amnesty International, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for its work on behalf of political prisoners, wrote Ms. McLellan on Nov. 26, 2004, saying that it had conducted an in-depth interview with Mr. Almalki and found him to be credible.
It urged the minister to set up an independent investigation of his case to determine "the nature and extent of co-operation between Syrian and Canadian officials" while he was detained in Damascus.
The rights group said it wants to make sure anything Mr. Almalki might have said under torture is not used against him or anyone else.
Amnesty also asked that the investigator determine what might be appropriate compensation for any violation of Mr. Almalki's rights.
Ms. McLellan is the minister responsible for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
RCMP Superintendent Mike Cabana has said Mr. Almalki was the target of an anti-terrorism investigation in Canada before he was detained in Syria. But he has never been charged.
Alex Neve, Amnesty's secretary-general for Canada, said the group did not expect the government to go into the substance of the RCMP and CSIS investigations of Mr. Almalki.
"We never ask what the government has in their files about people. We want to know about process, that there is a process to make sure a person's rights are protected," Mr. Neve said.
Mr. Swann said the delay in responding to Amnesty's letter was not an attempt to cover anything up.
"The government shares the view there needs to be a robust review mechanism, so these things are looked into," he added.
Mr. Swann said Ms. McLellan would not be available for an interview.
Amnesty eventually raised the Almalki case and that of Ahmad El Maati, a Toronto truck driver who also says he was tortured in Syria, in a letter to Prime Minister Paul Martin dated June 7.
It took Mr. Martin two months to write back, saying he was referring the cases to Ms. McLellan.
Marc Roy, the associate director of communications for Mr. Martin, said for the second day in a row that he will not respond to questions about what due diligence the Prime Minister performed to make sure someone was getting to the bottom of the allegations of Canadian complicity in the torture of the two men or why it took two months to respond to the June 7 letter.
Mr. El Maati, 40, and Mr. Almalki broke their silence in interviews recently with The Globe and Mail, describing their encounters with suspicious Canadian authorities, their arrests in Syria, detention in a filthy military intelligence prison and torture to extract information about other Canadian Muslim men and alleged terrorist activities in Canada.
Their accounts are similar to that of Maher Arar, an Ottawa software engineer who also was imprisoned in Syria.
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