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Official's
affadavit says he suspected woman detained in Kenya was sister of the
Canadian now suing over ordeal
John Goddard
Ottawa, October 3, 2009 – The first Canadian official to interview a
woman detained in Kenya for not looking like her passport photo says he
suspected the woman to be Suaad Hagi Mohamud's sister.
"My suspicion was based on four factors," migrant integrity officer Paul
Jamieson says in an affidavit.
First of all, the woman bore a family resemblance to Mohamud's passport
photo, he said.
As well, a sister Jihan, younger by 10 months, appeared on Mohamud's
Canadian immigration application years ago; the woman in Kenya knew
Mohamud's basic biographical details, and finally; "in my experience it
is common for imposters to be related to the rightful holder of the
passport," he said.
Jamieson's affidavit features among court documents offering the first
glimpse into Ottawa's reasons for declaring the holder of Mohamud's
passport an "imposter" when stopped trying to board a flight to Toronto
on May 21.
Jamieson said he interviewed the woman – in English – three times in
five days while she was in Kenyan custody. The first time was by phone
May 21, the second in person at the airport May 22, the third at the
Canadian High Commission on May 25.
But his affidavit and other federal documents leave key questions
unaddressed, such as why Mohamud was never charged with an offence and
why Ottawa paid her way home to Toronto after a DNA test – deemed 99.9
per cent accurate – established her identity, statistically ruling out a
sister.
Was the woman he interviewed the same one who passed the DNA test three
months later? Jamieson doesn't say. He left the high commission June 25
for a posting in South Africa, he says, and makes no mention of seeing
the woman again.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Mohamud was adamant that there was no
imposter.
"I don't have a sister younger than me, older than me, I have no sister
over there," she said. Somebody else filled out the original immigration
application, she said.
She has spoken in the past of only four older half-sisters.
"The person they caught at the airport, it was me," she said.
Mohamud was born in Somalia, immigrated to Canada 10 years ago and holds
only Canadian citizenship.
She has said repeatedly that, on May 21, she was about to board a flight
home to Toronto after a three-week visit when a KLM airlines employee
questioned her passport photo and passed her to Kenyan authorities.
That night, Jamieson says, he reached a detainee by phone.
"I did not take notes of the telephone interview ... but I recall some
of the questions and answers," he says in the sworn statement dated
Sept. 28.
In response to biographical questions, the detainee said she was a
student at Humber College and named Randy Jackson as one of her
professors, Jamieson says.
Later, he found no such professor listed on the college website and
noted Randy Jackson is "a popular media figure" (best known as a judge
on American Idol).
The detainee could not name the Canadian prime minister or Toronto's
mayor, Jamieson said, and could not name teachers at her 12-year-old
son's Toronto school.
Jamieson ordered the woman further detained and the next day, with a
junior officer, interviewed her at the airport face-to-face.
"I took handwritten notes," his affidavit says. But Mohamud said Tuesday
he taped that interview.
The session began with Jamieson asking for a sample signature, which he
says differed "significantly" from the passport and immigration
application signatures. The first name she variously spelled "Suaad" and
"Suad," he says.
At different points she said she was studying at Humber College,
thinking of studying at Seneca College and working at ATS, a courier
company. She could not say what ATS stands for, Jamieson says.
At one point, Jamieson says he asked himself whether the person he was
interviewing was different from the person he had spoken to the night
before. There had been no "switch," he concluded.
Toronto customer loyalty cards and similar items in her possession did
not impress him, he says.
"When an individual gives their passport to someone else to use, they
often also provide a package of secondary identity documents," he says.
"At the close of our interview, I addressed the person with whom I was
speaking as Jihan, and advised her that I believed she was using her
sister's passport," Jamieson says. "She smiled briefly, then looked
away.
"She stated that she didn't know why I was calling her Jihan, didn't
know a Jihan and insisted that she was Suaad."
The woman remained in detention over the weekend and on Monday, May 25,
the Kenyans drove her to the high commission, where Jamieson interviewed
her.
"I did not take notes," he says.
Measuring her height, he found her "six or seven centimetres shorter"
than it said on her driver's licence. (Canadian officials measured her
again on July 27, the day of the DNA test, but the documents do not say
whether the measurement was the same or different.)
"Throughout the (third) interview, I found the person concerned to be
vague and evasive," Jamieson states. "Typically, when I asked a question
about Toronto she would not reply at first but would instead begin
crying or protesting that she did not know why I was doing this."
Jamieson's affidavit appears among a stack of documents filed in Ontario
Superior Court of Justice in connection with Mohamud's $2.6 million
lawsuit against Ottawa alleging "callous and reckless treatment of her
while she was abroad."
Her revised notice of action, which also appears in the stack, contains
a few new details as well.
In interviews with the Star while she was detained, Mohamud said she was
a divorced mother of a 12-year-old in Toronto, and that she fended for
herself in slum hotels while stranded in Nairobi.
In her notice of action, she says that in 2007 she married Mohamud
Osman, a Kenyan of Somali origin who lives in Nairobi.
The notice says she took a planned three-week vacation to Kenya partly
to visit him, and not only her mother, as she previously said in
interviews.
In the lawsuit, the husband and mother each claim $100,000 as part of
the $2.6 million in damages.
"The thing is I'm here, I'm a single mom, I live with my son," Mohamud
said Tuesday. "(My husband) wasn't part of the story."
Mohamud's Toronto lawyer, Raoul Boulakia, said the marriage was never a
secret and was declared in open court in Kenya.
"The issue is not her private life," Boulakia said. "The story is that
she is Suaad ... (Her husband) is a Somali-Kenyan, the most marginalized
people in Kenyan society, what's he supposed to do? ...
Boulakia called the Jamieson affidavit "the linchpin" in Ottawa's case,
with the sister theory supporting the argument the case is "very
complicated," as Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in August.
Federal justice officials were not available for comment.
With files from Katie Daubs
Source: The Star, Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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