This is a SCANDAL of gargantuan proportions. This CONVICTED TERRORIST AND HIJACKER has been in Canada enjoying life and using taxpayer-funded health care for himself and his scions for the last TWENTY YEARS. Why has he never been deported after exhausting all his legal remedies? Who is looking the other way? Has he cut some sort of deal with the government? It is time to take out the trash...
Convicted terrorist remains in Canada 20 years after deportation
'I'll fight to the last moment'
Barbara Brown and Paul Legall
The Hamilton Spectator
BRANTFORD (Jul 16, 2008)
A convicted terrorist ordered out of Canada two decades ago is still living with his family in their modest semi-detached bungalow in northeast Brantford.
Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad made international headlines in 1968 when he and an accomplice attacked an Israeli commercial airliner at the Athens airport. They killed one passenger and destroyed the plane in a failed escape bid.
Nineteen years and several countries later, Mohammad entered Canada after lying about his terrorist past. Immigration Canada caught him in the lie and ordered him deported in December 1988.
Today, he is preparing to celebrate his 65th birthday in Canada, as appeal after appeal has delayed his expulsion. And there's no indication the man who describes himself as a Palestinian freedom fighter will be going anywhere soon.
The Brantford bungalow is the only home Mohammad has known since coming to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1987 with his wife, Fadia Khalil, and their three young children.
Now a grandfather, his two adult daughters and son have put down roots of their own. A family member recently offered to buy the other half of the Ashgrove Avenue duplex but lost out to a higher bidder, who scooped the unit for $172,000.
The family appears to have outlived the notoriety that hounded them when Mohammad's terrorist past first grabbed headlines in January 1988. For several weeks that winter, they were under siege from reporters, police and CSIS agents who were camped on the street in front of their house.
But in recent years, the story has cropped up only periodically and his new neighbours say they know nothing about Mohammad's immigration woes and criminal background.
"I heard only good things about him," said realtor Martin Sarkissian, who handled the sale of the adjoining unit.
When two Spectator reporters showed up at his door unannounced, two young boys played in the driveway and a penned dog barked loudly at the strangers.
Mohammad's youngest daughter, Lama, 23, came to the door as her father was heard through a kitchen window speaking in Arabic on the telephone.
Lama said her father was making an overseas call and wouldn't be interested in talking to reporters, who she claimed had always twisted his words in the past.
"You don't know what I went through as child," said Lama, referring to painful memories of growing up the object of ridicule and in the glare of unwanted publicity.
But several minutes later, the normally media-shy head of household appeared at the door. Tall and distinguished-looking, the man listened politely as the reporters asked for an interview on the 20th anniversary of what's believed to be the longest running deportation case in the country.
He complained that the news media falsely portrayed him as a terrorist.
"I was a freedom fighter -- not a terrorist," he said. "I was fighting Israel, the enemy of (his people)."
Mohammad was born in Palestine on July 20, 1943. His family was displaced and moved to Lebanon after the state of Israel was formed in 1948.
Mohammad stressed he has lived peacefully in Canada for the past 21 years.
"My record in Canada is clean, clear and good."
But it was his criminal record almost 40 years ago in another part of the world that put him in conflict with authorities here in Canada.
On Dec. 15, 1988, an immigration adjudicator ruled Mohammad should be expelled from the country because he had concealed his role in a politically motivated attack on an El Al jetliner airliner that was about to take off from Athens on Dec. 26, 1968, with 50 passengers and crew aboard.
Under orders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the 25-year-old guerrilla fighter and another man hurled grenades and sprayed the plane with machine-gun fire. An Israeli passenger was killed when hit by a piece of shrapnel. Mohammad and his accomplice were arrested at the airport after they tried to light fuel that was leaking on the tarmac from a punctured tank. The aircraft was destroyed in the attack.
In 1970, a Greek court convicted Mohammad of manslaughter and six other charges and sentenced him to 17 years in jail. But he was freed a few months later after another Palestinian terrorist group hijacked a Greek jetliner and threatened to kill more than 50 passengers unless the Greek government released Mohammad and half a dozen other political prisoners.
After being pardoned by Greece, Mohammad lived in different parts of the Middle East, including Lebanon, where he married his wife in 1976. The couple spent a few months in Cyprus in the 1980s until he was barred from re-entering the country for security reasons in 1984.
They were living in Spain with their children before being admitted to Canada as landed immigrants in 1987.
In his application for residency, Mohammad denied being convicted of any crime and didn't mention he'd been barred from Cyprus.
He also claimed no involvement in any political organization since he was 18 years old. In fact, he was a long-time card-carrying member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- a militant group dedicated to armed struggle against Israel.
As a result of these lies and omissions, he was ordered deported in 1988. But Mohammad forestalled his removal by applying for convention refugee status, which protects people who would be persecuted for their race, nationality or similar reasons back home.
In 2001, the refugee board's appeal division concluded Mohammad was a "terrorist" under the Immigration Act and upheld his deportation. But through seemingly inexhaustible avenues of appeal and due process of law, he has staved off deportation to Lebanon, where stateless Palestinians in refugee camps face extremely harsh conditions.
When a government spokesperson commented on the case in 2006, Mohammad had been granted another pre-removal risk assessment (PRRA), which meant a new hearing and a re-evaluation of an earlier risk assessment that found it would not mean his certain death to send Mohammad to a Lebanese refugee camp.
His Toronto lawyer, Barbara Jackman, who represented Mohammad at his PRRA hearing, could not be reached for comment.
Immigration Canada spokesperson Lonny Kates said recently he would not disclose for privacy reasons any updates on Mohammad's case. Kates would only confirm that Mohammad was still in the country and that no decision has been made yet concerning his removal from Canada.
After being ordered deported nearly 20 years ago, Mohammad vows not to give up without a fight.
"Usually, expecting the (decision) is more difficult than to have it ...," he said. "But I'll fight to the last moment. I am not going to give up."
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