Officials with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canada’s immigration department recently arrested a former bodyguard of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat for being a threat to Canadian security, a spokesman with the immigration authorities revealed last week.
Wahid Khalil Baroud, 43, was arrested June 6 at his home near Toronto, where officials presented a rarely used National Security Certificate for his arrest.
The warrant, signed by Immigration Minister Sergio Marchi and Solicitor General Herb Gray, was based on information provided by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s equivalent of the FBI and CIA. No further details were revealed.
Baroud, an officer in Arafat’s mainstream Al Fatah organization, arrived at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport from Greece in May 1991 with his wife and three children.
The family, traveling on forged Egyptian passports and claiming to be Israelis, filed for refugee status.
But Canadian officials issued an arrest warrant after Baroud missed two immigration hearings.
Baroud was reportedly in charge of coordinating PLO terrorist acts in Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Greece, where he had been stationed for eight years.
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