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Updates on Two Political Prisoners - by Stephen Lendman
Earlier articles addressed them, accessed through the following links:
Pakistani Canadians Mahboob Khawaja, his son Momin, and family were wrongfully targeted for alleged involvement in terrorism. Mahboob is an "academic specializing in Strategic Studies with special interests in Western-Islamic Civilizations, Change and Conflict Resolution."
While working in Saudi Arabia, dozens of Royal Canadian Mounted police arrested his family at gunpoint in Ottawa. They blew open his door, then searched his home lawlessly with no warrant and found nothing. At the same time, Mahboob was arrested in Saudi Arabia, jailed for two weeks, then released. The affair ruined his academic career as a professor of global politics, and Momin's as a software developer and free man.
In March 2004, he was bogusly accused of a UK bomb plot, becoming the first person charged under Canada's 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act. Though acquitted on that charge, he was held without trial for over four years, then convicted on October 29, 2008, and sentenced on March 12, 2009, after a bench trial, to ten and a half years (above time already served) for allegedly:
-- donating $859 to an Afghan refugee charity; in fact, he gave $25;
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