Canada's Top Cop Resigns Over Torture Case

The head of Canada's national police resigned Wednesday amid criticism over his handling of the case of a Canadian citizen deported by the United States to Syria.

On Tuesday, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli admitted he got his facts wrong when he testified at a House of Commons committee in September about when he first knew the RCMP had passed erroneous information to U.S. authorities about Maher Arar.

An inquiry concluded that the information — which suggested Arar had ties to al Qaeda — likely led the U.S. to deport him to Syria where he says he was tortured.

Zaccardelli told a public security hearing on Tuesday in the federal capital of Ottawa that the police force first told U.S. authorities that Syrian-born Maher Arar was a "man of interest" and may have ties to Islamic extremists.

Zaccardelli said RCMP officials then told Washington that they had no evidence to support those allegations, yet U.S. authorities went ahead and deported Arar to his native country, where he says he was tortured into making false confessions to involvement in terrorism.

Zaccardelli's changing testimony about the Arar case led to increasing calls for his resignation or dismissal.

Arar, a 34-year-old software engineer, was traveling on a Canadian passport when he was detained at New York's Kennedy Airport on Sept. 26, 2002, during a stopover on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia. After his release from a Damascus prison in 2003, Arar made detailed allegations about beatings and whippings with electrical cables, which Canadian authorities have come to accept as credible.

Arar was exonerated of all suspicion of terrorist activity in September by a Canadian government commission. He has become the best-known case of extraordinary rendition — the U.S. transfer of foreign terror suspects without court approval to third countries where they can be subjected to torture.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper last month demanded a formal apology from the White House, saying Arar had been unfairly deported to face torture in Syria and that American officials "had not been candid and truthful" in dealing with Canadian authorities.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in October wrote a letter to the Canadian government assuring Ottawa that the United States would not unilaterally send Canadian citizens to third-party countries for questioning about terrorist activities.

There was no apology for the Arar affair in the letter, but Ottawa said it was satisfied.

In September, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said "the people who made the decisions at the time ... determined a couple of things: One, that this individual posed a threat to the United States based on the information that they had; and two, that they were able to assure themselves, they had the reasonable expectation that this individual was not going to be maltreated."

Zaccardelli has come under criticism because when he first testified before the federal security committee on Sept. 28, he said he knew about the conflicting reports on Arar sent to Washington in 2002. On Tuesday, however, he told the committee that he did not learn of the mistakes until this fall.

It remains unclear what Zaccardelli truly knew about the Arar case, and when he knew it.

"No senior staff, including myself, were told of the inaccuracies in the information provided to the Americans," Zaccardelli said.

Later Tuesday. Harper said he was "surprised and concerned" at the way Zaccardelli changed his story on the Arar case.