Hassan Almrei

Hassan Ahmed Almrei (Arabic: حسن أحمد المرعي also childhood name Abu al-Hareth)[1] (born in Syria on January 1, 1974),[2] a Syrian citizen, arrived in Canada in 1999 claiming refugee status.

He has been since held, and accused of terrorist connections and ideology, for his "reputation... for obtaining false documents", and his relationship with Ibn al-Khattab following time shared together during the Civil war in Tajikistan.

[4] He claims to have been self-employed since February 1990 when he finished high school, though he later stated that he'd spent several months doing office work for the charitable Muslim African Agency following graduation.

[9] He later explained that he had traveled towards Afghanistan, after using his father's contacts in the Muslim Brotherhood to purchase a forged Syrian passport,[4] to attend a Jalalabad camp run by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a commander in the Northern Alliance.

[4] However, he contracted malaria and remained in a guest house called Bait al-Ansar in Peshawar for a year before attending Sayyaf's camp, where'd he trained on an AK-47 with a group named Ittihad-i-Islami.

[17] He unsuccessfully tried to immigrate to Canada with his Syrian passport #3286630 on April 19, 1998, stating that he wished to visit Hisham Al Taha in Richmond, British Columbia.

[4][18][19] He traveled to Thailand in August 1998,[14] where he met a Palestinian people smuggler named Ghaled whom he befriended given his own reputation for acquiring false passports.

[4] The two met at the Toronto copy store owned by al-Marabh's uncle, Ahmed Shehab, where a number of prominent forged identity cards were later found - and Almrei sold him the fake passport.

[4] After al-Marabh was arrested trying to illegally enter the United States hiding in a tractor trailer, Almrei visited him in the Thorold prison, and collected money from colleagues to loan him C$2,500 for bail.

[4] He was granted refugee status in June 2000, stating that he feared persecution in Syria due to his father's alleged membership in the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of his employees who was working "under the table" due to her visa restrictions, asked Almrei if he knew any men who might enter a marriage of convenience if she offered them C$4,000 to allow her to remain in the country.

[1] On October 19, 2001, Almrei was brought to his lawyer's office for a CSIS interview; where he again reiterated his travels and denied having ever been to Sudan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Dagestan or Chechnya.

[26] He was also confronted with the fact that photographs of Ibn Khattab, Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta were found on his computer, though he protested that agents were taking them out of context and had simply been photos from news agencies such as BBC which were included in online stories he had read, and were saved in his web cache.

Subsequently, he carries a stigma and requested he be allowed to remain in solitary confinement rather than released into the general prison population, as he maintained the guards were his "friends".

[4] He spent most of his time in prison watching the CPAC Parliamentary channel, and said he did not harbour a grudge against Canada for his treatment since he came from Saudi Arabia and Syria which have even fewer human rights.

[4] At Almrei's second application for release, in 2005, he attracted the attention of Alexandre Trudeau, who offered to post C$5000 after meeting him while filming a documentary on the security certificate issue.

[4][29] Another CSIS agent identified only as J.P., the Deputy Chief of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation in the Ottawa Regional Office as of 2005, testified against the petitions for release by Almrei, Jaballah and Charkaoui.

[30] Almrei was ordered released under house arrest by Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley on January 2, 2009, under strict monitoring conditions including an electronic tracking leg-bracelet.

Mosley said CSIS and the ministers "breached their duties of utmost good faith and candour to the court by not thoroughly reviewing the information in their possession, prior to the issuance of the February 2008 certificate."