September 18, 2002	Wednesday	Rajab 10, 1423

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LOS ANGELES, Sept 17: Shakir Ali Baloch, 40, a Canadian citizen and son of a former Pakistani civil servant, insists he does not know why the federal agents picked him up at a Long Island City driving school nine days after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.

A Pakistani-born Canadian citizen, Baloch, said he thought it was simply an immigration matter, and after he admitted to officials that he was living illegally in a Queens Boulevard apartment, he expected he would be deported within days.

But what followed was a gruelling 7-month ordeal in which he was beaten, questioned several times in a way which showed how deeply the FBI was interested to know about Muslims and the amount of hatred in the US government for the people of Islamic faith.

“The FBI agents asked if I knew anybody involved in terrorism, about terrorist attacks, or if I had ever funded any terrorist-related groups. They also asked if I hated Jews or, as a Sunni Muslim, hated the Shia Muslims,” Baloch told in an exclusive interview to Newsday.

Baloch said he denied he was involved with terrorists and he referred the FBI to his Jewish and Christian friends. He said he told them everything, even that he had bought a fake Social Security card.

He also explained that his father and brother were members of the “pretty liberal,” religiously moderate and pro-Western political faction of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s PPP.

Baloch’s ordeal began on Sept 20, as he sat in a classroom in a Long Island City driving school studying to become a taxi driver.

Baloch said he earned a medical degree in Pakistan before migrating to Canada in 1989 with his wife, where they had a daughter and five years later became Canadian citizens.

When his daughter was diagnosed with diabetes in 1998, Baloch moved to New York as wages in Canada are very low. He wanted to study and take a medical technician examination. He said he loved New York so much he remained there illegally. After he was deported in late 2000, he returned through the Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls, like thousands of others do each year.

Baloch said a teacher at the driving school told him that “there’s someone to see you”. He said when he went to the office, two officers said: “You have to come with us.”

Baloch said he was first taken to his apartment, where he was questioned by the FBI agents, INS officials and the New York City police, who also searched the apartment. Later, he was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, where he was strip-searched, picked up by four or five guards and slammed into each of the room’s four walls, then dumped into solitary confinement.

During his first month in jail, Baloch complained he was not allowed visitors. When he got his monthly telephone call, an INS official would dial the number, hold the phone up to him and, even if there was no answer, fill out a form, saying Baloch had his call.

“I kept telling them I wanted to talk to my consulate and that I wanted to talk to my lawyer,” Baloch said, “but they wouldn’t let me.”

No one else knew that the US government had arrested a Canadian citizen — it didn’t show up on the four heavily redacted documents or lists of INS detainees released to the media, or in a consular note to Ottawa.

In November, the FBI began paying him visits, Baloch said. “I saw the FBI three or four times,” he said, each time for two to three hours and always without an attorney.

That same month, his family in Toronto became concerned because they had not heard from him and sought help from a local immigrants’ group and the Canadian government.

When the Canadian government asked the US State Department if the federal investigators had detained Baloch, an spokesman for the foreign ministry in Ottawa said the answer was” “no, we have not.”

After attorneys and activists found Baloch at the detention centre, the stunned Canadian government sent an unusual note, requesting an explanation. The State Department replied that Baloch had waived his rights to contact the Canadian consul. Baloch said he did it because he thought he was being deported, but he added that his later requests were denied.

After his detention became public, New York lawyer Joel Kupferman, a National Lawyers Guild member, visited him in jail. “It was the first time my visit with a client has ever been videotaped,” Kupferman said. Baloch, he said, was shackled in leg, arm and body chains.

Kupferman filed for a writ of habeas corpus, and Baloch gave interviews to the news media.

But in what Kupferman describes as retaliation, the Justice Department filed two criminal charges against Baloch — illegal re-entry and having a fake Social Security card.

To speed up his release, Baloch said he pleaded guilty in mid-February. The INS moved him into the jail’s general population — a sign, his lawyers say, the FBI had cleared him. The FBI never sent him a letter saying it had cleared him as it had to some other detainees.

In mid-April, the INS finally put Baloch on a flight to Toronto with nothing but his jail clothes, dark pants and a white T-shirt.

Now living on Canadian social assistance for the first time, Baloch said he learned he might have been exposed to tuberculosis while in detention after his TB test was positive, though a lung X-ray proved negative.

Meanwhile, his attorneys say they are trying to get the US government to return his belongings.

“They kept my watch, my briefcase, my clothes, my shoes, my health card, my citizenship card, my social insurance card,” he said. “They took everything. And they never gave me anything back.”

Now, finally released and deported, Baloch said in an interview in Toronto that his ordeal has left him unemployed and unable to work. He said he is depressed and cannot concentrate long enough to read. Sometimes, he said, he just shakes uncontrollably.

“I was living an ordinary life, with the problems you face in a normal everyday life,” he said. “But now I’ve lost my privacy. Now I’m in the world as a suspect.”