Somali came to Canada at age five, declared a threat to Canadians
BY ANDREW DUFFY, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
Monday, November 08, 2010
Victoria Roger-Louie, 45, urged the federal immigration minister to reject Abadir Ali's plea to remain in Canada.
"I believe he is Somalia's problem," Roger-Louie told the Citizen. "It's time for him to go: he's been here on taxpayers' dollars for long enough."
Ali, 27, has been held in the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre by immigration authorities for the past two-and-a-half years. He has appealed to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to halt his deportation, arguing that it amounts to a death sentence for someone who doesn't speak Somali.
But Roger-Louie said Ali is a violent criminal who does not deserve another chance in Canada: "I'm still scared of him. My life will never be the same because of him."
Last year, a federal immigration official declared Ali a threat to Canadians because of five adult criminal convictions, two of which involved violent assaults.
In February 2001, he beat a roommate with a bottle and stabbed him with a pair of scissors; in July 2007, he sent Roger-Louie to hospital with a broken rib, a collapsed lung and a cracked skull.
Earlier this year, a Federal Court judge upheld Ali's danger designation and approved his removal.
His deportation remains on hold, however, while the government comes up with a travel plan to safely return him to Somalia.
Roger-Louie said an intoxicated Ali attacked her because she had "put him in his place" in front of a small group of friends on July 26, 2007. She had known him only a few months.
Ali returned to Roger-Louie's Centretown apartment after everyone had left. When she opened the door, he came in, locked the apartment, grabbed Roger-Louie by the throat and threw her to the floor, according to court records.
Legally blind, Roger-Louie was kicked and beaten so badly that she had to undergo emergency brain surgery.
"It was apparently totally unjustified in his mind for a woman to speak to a man like that," she said. "That's what he came back to fix. He was screaming at me to, 'Say I was sorry, say I was sorry'."
The attack left her with permanent damage to her short-term memory. Her ability to learn and retain new information has been compromised.
"He's taken two years from my life: I don't remember anything for two years after this assault," she said. "It has changed a lot of things that I had planned."
Roger-Louie has been unable to return to her job as a hairdresser.
In January 2008, Ali pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in the case and was sentenced to 47 days in jail, in addition to the five months he had already served.
Unhappy with Ali's sentence, Roger-Louie was relieved to learn the government intended to deport him. "That's the only thing I found acceptable about the whole plea bargain: the fact that he'd be forced to leave my country," she said.
Ali was born on Jan. 1, 1983, in the town of Hargeisa, in northern Somalia, where his father was a member of the Somali National Movement, which opposed the regime of then Somali dictator Siad Barre.
His family was forced to flee Hargeisa when it came under bombardment by government forces in 1988. Ali spent the next three years in a refugee camp; his father was jailed.
Ali arrived in Canada with his stepmother in August, 1991 at age 8 and was granted refugee status one year later. He clashed with his stepmother and spent much of his childhood in foster homes.
In a jailhouse interview earlier this year, Ali insisted he's not a hardened criminal. "I'm a human being: everybody makes mistakes in their lives," Ali said. "There's much worse guys out there than me walking around the streets."
More than 200 people from Ottawa's Somali community have signed a petition, asking the government to suspend Ali's deportation until conditions in Somalia have improved.
Ali could become the second refugee deported from Canada to Somalia this year. In September, Canada returned Mohamed Said Jama, 40, to Bosaso, Somalia.
Jama, who came to Canada in 1991 as a refugee, was declared a danger to the public because of a violent criminal record that included an aggravated assault conviction for stabbing a man in the cheek.
Somalia's United Nations-backed government is now battling the Islamist group, al-Shabbab, for control of the capital, Mogadishu. The al-Qaeda linked group already controls much of southern and central Somalia.
Source: Ottawa Citizen