The strange case of Suaad Mohamud

The awful tale of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, the single mother stranded in Kenya, has ignited outrage across the land. Last May, the Somalia-born Canadian was about to board a KLM flight back to Canada after visiting her family in Kenya, when an airline official questioned her identity. He thought she didn’t look like her passport photo. Canadian officials declared her an imposter, and voided her passport. The Kenyans charged her for travelling with false documents, and she spent a week in jail. Two and a half months later, after a DNA test finally confirmed Ms. Mohamud’s identity, she flew back to Toronto for a tearful reunion with her 12-year-old son.

“They picked on her lips to deny her re-entry to Canada,” wrote a columnist for the Toronto Star, the news outlet that broke the story and has been riding it hard ever since.

By then, everyone – immigration lawyers, human-rights activists, editorial writers, and Liberal politicians – had joined the bandwagon. Ms. Mohamud tearily told her story to everyone in sight, and promptly launched a lawsuit against the government for $2.5-million in damages.

The ghost of Maher Arar looms large here. A Star editorial accused Canada of being a country that abandons its own. “Canadians are paying a high cost – in shame and tax dollars – for Ottawa’s callous treatment of citizens who happen to be Muslim,” it said. Liberal MP Bob Rae declaimed, “When you catch the wrong person you should say you’re sorry and you should face the music.” Commentators demanded the heads of consular officials, and expressed astonishment that they had rejected Ms. Mohamud’s other proofs of her identity, including her driver’s licence and her Shoppers Drug Mart card. The bureaucrats and the Harper government were denounced for everything from gross incompetence to racism. “This smacks not just of prejudice, but of apartheid,” wrote the Star’s Christopher Hume.

And then, two weeks ago, the government filed its response. It included an affidavit from Paul Jamieson, a consular official with the title of migration integrity officer. Mr. Jamieson interviewed Ms. Mohamud three times in Kenya, once by phone and twice in person. Many of her answers, he says, were contradictory. She couldn’t answer basic facts about Toronto (such as the name of the lake on which the city is situated), or even about herself. She gave the wrong birth date for her son, and couldn’t give details on the circumstances or place of his birth. She couldn’t explain what she did for her employer, a courier company. She was also six or seven centimetres shorter than the height given on her drivers’ licence.

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