RCMP grill man named on terror list

By ESTANISLAO OZIEWICZ From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

A man with the same name as one sought by the FBI in connection with last month's suicide attacks on the United States has been arrested trying to enter Canada, The Globe and Mail has learned.

The man is being interviewed by Canadian immigration authorities as well as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

He was carrying a Yemeni passport in the name of Samir Mohamed al-Maktari. The name Samir al-Maktari appears on a list of several hundred suspects, material witnesses and others created by the FBI that had been mistakenly distributed on the Internet by authorities in Finland.

It remains unclear what route the man took to fly into Pearson International Airport. He is believed to have arrived over the weekend.

It also is not known on what basis (as a visitor, student, businessman, potential immigrant or refugee claimant) the man, thought to be in his late 20s, was trying to enter Canada.

Toronto-based Immigration Department spokeswoman Giovanna Gatti said Monday that the department can neither confirm nor deny The Globe's information.

She also said that an individual's immigration or refugee process at a Canadian port of entry is covered under federal privacy legislation.

An RCMP spokesman said he was unaware of the case but the RCMP would not be able to comment about any continuing investigation in any case.

The once confidential report of 370 suspects and other individuals that contained the name Samir al-Maktari was compiled by the FBI and European officials within days of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It had been been made available to governments worldwide to track down terrorist bank accounts.

But Finland's Financial Supervision Authority, which oversees financial markets, mistakenly published the detailed list in full on its public Web site. It was removed within hours and the Finnish government later apologized for the error.

The list included the names of suspects, material witnesses and people who were acquainted with the hijackers but not necessarily considered suspects.

In many cases, the information on the list included suspected aliases, dates and places of birth, addresses, and even telephone numbers.

However, there is no such information on the list for Mr. al-Maktari.

The list has been controversial beyond the issue of its unintended publication. For example, a German man appeared on the list because he shared an apartment in Florida for six weeks with suicide hijacker Ziad Jarrah, who is believed to have flown the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

The man, a 23-year-old flight student from Hamburg, said his bank account had been frozen and he was harassed by reporters because his name appeared on the list.

The German flight student said that as soon as he found out his name was listed as possibly connected to the events of Sept. 11, he voluntarily told German police all he knew about Mr. Jarrah.

A spokesman for the German federal crime agency known as BKA told Reuters news agency: "It was a mistake that his name ended up on the list of suspects. He came forward on his own to provide his own eyewitness account of what he knew. He is no longer on the list and he is not a suspect."

-- Anonymous, October 30, 2001