Source: CBC News Ottawa
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Date: March 24, 2005


OTTAWA - Sophie Harkat is vowing to fight to keep her husband in Canada. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service believes Mohamed Harkat is an al-Qaeda sleeper agent who's been living in Ottawa since the late '90s.

Earlier this week, a federal court judge upheld the security certificate that has been used to keep Harkat in jail for more than two years.

About 100 of Harkat's supporters gathered in Ottawa, Wednesday, to protest his expected deportation to Algeria. Sophie Harkat spoke briefly to the gathering at the human-rights monument on Elgin Street. She promised to fight her husband's deportation.Harkat's supporters say his lawyers have warned them that the government will probably move quickly to deport Harkat. But an opposition member of the Commons national security subcommittee says he believes that's unlikely. The NDP's Joe Comartin says Harkat can easily make a convincing case that he faces torture in his native country.

"It'll go through the process of the risk assessment, and, if past practice is any guide, he probably won't be sent back," Comartin says.

The federal court's ruling leaves that decision in the hands of the government. If it doesn't want to deport him, it now faces the dilemma of deciding what to do with a man it says is too dangerous to release, when no clear law exists to keep him in prison here.

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