Labour leaders break law, fund alleged terrorist

By Brian Lilley, Parliamentary Bureau

OTTAWA – Members of the Canadian Labour Congress broke the law Friday by giving money to an alleged terrorist on the United Nations no-fly list and challenging the federal government to arrest them.

Labour leaders representing rank-and-file union members from across the country gave $3,000 cash to Abousfian Abdelrazik and then took up a separate collection from those in attendance at a CLC meeting Friday.

Abdelrazik is a Canadian citizen from Sudan who has been placed on the UN list of people believed have ties to al-Qaida.

“The mere act of supporting him means we are guilty and the government should come and arrest us,” Hassan Yussuff, secretary with the CLC, told delegates at the meeting.

Yussuff told QMI Agency he’s confident union members across the country support the payment to Abdelrazik. He called it a violation of human rights that the Canadian government does not allow Abdelrazik to hold a job or bank account and refuses to issue him a passport.

UN resolution 1267 calls on all member countries to freeze the funds and financial assets of people on the list and prevent their travel.

Yussuff called on the Canadian government to press the UN to have Abdelrazik removed from the terror list.

The federal government declined to answer questions Friday about reports it supports removing him from the list.

Abdelrazik was friends with millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam when they both lived in Montreal. The U.S. government and courts in France also link the former machinist to Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden’s former top advisor, who is now confined in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

While Abdelrazik has denied he has any links to al-Qaida, he does admit to having traveled during the 1990s to places such as Pakistan, Georgia and Bosnia, all hot spots of Islamic militancy.

The UN alleges Abdelrazik attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in 1996.