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.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of