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Former detainee returns to Canada after two years

A Canadian man who was released from Guantanamo Bay military prison by US officials after spending two years in captivity returned to Canada on Sunday protesting his innocence.

CBC television showed pictures of Abdurahman Khadr, 21, arriving at Toronto airport.

Khadr said when US authorities released him last month they refused to send him back to Canada and put him on a plane to Afghanistan instead.

Khadr's younger brother Omar, 17, is still in the US prison in Cuba, accused of involvement in a fatal attack on a US soldier in Afghanistan. The father of the family, Ahmed Said Khadr, is a suspected member of al Qaeda.

Khadr was detained by Afghans in October 2001 -- he said that like most people there, he carried a gun -- and held until January this year, when he was moved to Guantanamo Bay.

"Why was I captured? Because I was armed. That was the only reason I was captured in Kabul. There was nothing against me," he told CBC.

"That's why I've been released after two years of my life being wasted," he added, declining to say how he had been treated in Guantanamo Bay. Human rights groups have criticized the US for holding the detainees without charges.

Relations between Ottawa and Washington are already strained over the case of a Canadian man who was deported from New York to Syria last year and says he was regularly tortured in jail.

Khadr said he made his way from Afghanistan through Iran to Turkey and then to the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where the Canadian embassy issued him with emergency travel documents.

Canadian foreign ministry officials, denying allegations by Khadr's lawyer that a number of embassies had refused to issue him travel documents, said the first time he had approached one of the country's missions was in Bosnia.
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