In Canada, an Outcast Family Finds Support

On the eighth floor of a Toronto high-rise, the women of the Khadr family keep vigil for Omar and Abdullah. Their mother, Maha, and sister Zaynab sit cross-legged on the floor, wearing chadors that leave only a slit for their brown eyes. From under the black cloaks, hands decorated with henna emerge.

Two of Maha's four sons are in Canada. Karim, 16, paralyzed in a shootout in Pakistan that killed his father, is in a wheelchair. He spends his time playing computer games. Abdurahman, 22, drops in occasionally between day labor jobs, though he is derided by his sister and mother for having spoken publicly of -- and then renounced -- his family's ties to al Qaeda.

"He is a lost cause," his mother sighed.

Their lawyer and relatives have urged them to shut up. Even their local mosque shuns them, Maha Khadr said.

But they are driven by their opinions, they say, and by the desire to keep the cases of Omar and Abdullah in the public eye. As they spoke, the two women were emotional, often inflammatory. They trumped each other's sentences, their words tumbling together.

Maha Khadr said they were "doomed" because they were outspokenly critical. "Isn't that supposed to be the thing that differentiates the Western world from the Eastern world? Freedom of speech? Freedom of thought? " Zaynab Khadr asked mockingly.

Their complaints have gained some traction. A suit filed by Edney has revealed that the only official Canadian contacts in 2003 and 2004 with Omar Khadr in Guantanamo were not by consular officials to advise him, but by intelligence agents who questioned him.

Edney neither confirms nor contests the U.S. soldiers' account indicating that Omar threw a grenade at them. He has called for a trial that would bring the evidence out in the open, allow cross examination of witnesses and deal with the question of Omar's age. Under international law, he is a minor.

"His detention and age raise a lot of very difficult issues for the Canadian government," said Kent Roach, a professor of law at the University of Toronto. "Was this person a child soldier? We don't know. His father was involved in al Qaeda, but to what extent were [Omar's] actions free choice?"

A Canadian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Rodney Moore, said recently that the government has made "ongoing diplomatic representations" and was allowed by the United States only this March to make its first "welfare visit" to Omar Khadr in Guantanamo.

Zaynab Khadr is skeptical of the emerging public support. "It's not that they are becoming sympathetic with us. It's that Canadians are feeling less secure about their own laws and their own government," she said. "If a child, no matter what his deed was -- he was 15, of Canadian birth -- can be treated like that, why can't any one of us?"

The Khadr family's notoriety began with its patriarch. Ahmed Said Khadr, who was born in Egypt and moved to Canada in 1977. He and his wife, Maha, a Palestinian who had lived most of her life in Ottawa, had six children -- four of them born in Canada.