(Rewrites paragraphs 1-2 after lawyer says Canada to release
Frenchman)
By Julie Gordon
TORONTO, Nov 4 (Reuters) - Mourad Benchellali, a French
national and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner detained by Canadian
police at a Toronto airport on Monday, will likely be released
and allowed to return to France within hours, his Canadian
lawyer said on Wednesday.
"The details are being worked out, but they are willing to
allow him to return tonight," Hadayt Nazami said in a phone
interview. Benchellali would withdraw his request to enter
Canada and voluntarily return to France, Nazami said.
Benchellali was arrested in 2001 at an Al Qaida training
camp in Afghanistan and taken into custody by the U.S. Army. He
was an inmate from January 2002 to July 2004 in the detention
camp on the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where
current and former prisoners have said they were tortured and
otherwise abused.
Benchellali was set to attend a conference in Canada on
preventing radicalization in prisons, but authorities arrested
him because of concerns about the time he spent in Afghanistan,
his lawyer said.
"What they were saying is that he was in a training camp in
Afghanistan in 2001. He was there for just two months. And
regardless of what has happened since then it makes no
difference to them," Nazami said.
The Canadian Border Services Agency's decision to release
Benchellali was as a surprise to him and his lawyer because the
Frenchman was expected to have a hearing by a higher level of
Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board, Nazami said.
A CBSA spokesman declined to comment.
For the past two years, Benchellali has been part of an
initiative to stop young people from joining Islamist militant
groups in Syria, his supporters say.
Toronto-based filmmaker Eileen Thalenberg said she had
invited Benchellali to Canada to attend the conference as part
of a documentary she is producing for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation.
Thalenberg said she checked with the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police and received assurances before bringing Benchellali from
France to Iceland and then to Canada, so he would not fly over
United States airspace.
"I would have never brought him otherwise," she said.
The RCMP declined to comment, referring queries to the CBSA.
Thalenberg said Benchellali sent her a text message from
prison on Wednesday saying: "I never thought I'd be in an orange
jumpsuit again."
Benchellali was previously stopped from boarding a flight to
Canada in June because he is still on the U.S. government's
no-fly list and the plane would have passed through U.S.
airspace.