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rfmcdonaldOne nightmare for a Somali-Canadian woman in Kenya is ending.
The above article has links to the Star's previous coverage, dating back to early July when it first broke the story.
Bill Curry in The Globe and Mail suggests that she should have gotten a new photo, while the National Post argues that the government's "investigation" was remarkably shoddy.
All this raises the question of whether Canadians--especially new Canadians--can count on their government to protect them if they're travelling outside of the counrry.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said today the Canada Border Services Agency will have to answer for its role in the plight of a Canadian woman marooned in Kenya for nearly three months.
"Our first priority as a government is obviously to see her get on a flight back to Canada," Harper said in Kitchener today, referring to Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Canadian citizen who was detained because Kenyan and Canadian officials there thought she did not look like her passport photo.
"In the case of the Canadian Border Service Agency," Harper continued, "I know that minister (of public safety Peter) Van Loan is asking that organization for a full accounting of their actions in this case and we'll obviously review those."
Based on what officials at the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi said were "conclusive investigations including an interview," Mohamud was branded an "imposter." Her passport was handed over to Kenyan officials for prosecution on charges of improper use of a travel document.
[. . .]
Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian, was branded an impostor by staff of the Canadian High Commission in Kenya because she did not resemble her passport photograph. Her lips were different from the four-year-old picture, as were her eyeglasses.
In a telephone interview from Nairobi yesterday, Mohamud gave further details of the event that started her ordeal when she tried to board a KLM flight home on May 21 after a three-week visit to Kenya.
A Kenyan KLM employee stopped her. "He told me he could make me miss my flight," she said of the KLM worker, who suggested Mohamud didn't look like her passport photo.
He seemed to be soliciting a bribe, she said, an experience Somali-born Torontonians say is commonplace for them at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
When she didn't pay, a Kenyan immigration official arrested her. Canadian consular officials went along, returning Mohamud to the Kenyans, who threw her in jail on charges of entering Kenya illegally on a passport not her own.
The above article has links to the Star's previous coverage, dating back to early July when it first broke the story.
Bill Curry in The Globe and Mail suggests that she should have gotten a new photo, while the National Post argues that the government's "investigation" was remarkably shoddy.
All this raises the question of whether Canadians--especially new Canadians--can count on their government to protect them if they're travelling outside of the counrry.
