Canadian stranded in Sudan is on his way home

THE CANADIAN PRESS
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
MONTREAL – Abousfian Abdelrazik has left Sudan and is on his way back to Canada.
The Canadian, who has been in exile in Sudan for six years, boarded a plane in Khartoum to take him to Abu Dhabi. He is scheduled to arrive in Toronto this afternoon and then head to Montreal to be reunited with his family.
The Conservative government said last week it would comply with a Federal Court order to let Abdelrazik return to Canada.
Abdelrazik was arrested but not charged during a 2003 visit to Sudan to see his ill mother.
He had been living in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum for months and Ottawa refused him a passport on the grounds he remained on a United Nations terror watch list.
No one has produced evidence to back up the UN allegations, Abdelrazik’s lawyer, Yavar Hameed, told Reuters in Khartoum before their plane left.
“It will be a huge relief when we get to Canada. I can’t rest until that happens,” Hameed said.
Abdelrazik posed for photographs at Khartoum airport but declined to give a statement ahead of his arrival in Canada.
Abdelrazik was born in Sudan and gained Canadian citizenship in 1995 after entering the country as a refugee.
He returned to Sudan in 2003 to visit his sick mother and was arrested and held by Sudanese authorities on two occasions.
Abdelrazik was freed in 2006 and has been living in the Canadian embassy in central Khartoum since late April 2008. He has denied being a militant.
Federal Court Judge Russel Zinn ruled earlier this month that Canada’s refusal to assist Abdelrazik was a breach of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says no Canadian can be deprived of the right to life, liberty and security.