Hussein Ali Sumaida says Canada is the only safe haven for him even if he spends the rest of his life here without legal status.A former double agent for the Israeli intelligence service and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, the now 52-year-old Hamilton man said his life would be in danger if he was sent anywhere in the Middle East.Canadian officials have been trying to remove Sumaida ever since he arrived in Toronto in 1990 for asylum and was deemed inadmissible to the country a year later for his “espionage” activities that they said made him complicit in crimes against humanity.In fact, Ottawa did deport him once to Tunisia — the birthplace of his Iraqi diplomat father, where he himself had never been — in 2005, but Sumaida assumed a false identity, “Brandon Timothy Casey,” and returned on an emergency passport.After living a low-profile life over the last decade, raising a family with a job in construction, Sumaida said he recently got a letter in the mail informing him that a pre-removal risk assessment had been initiated to determine if it’s safe for him to be deported to Tunisia again. “I just want to stay alive in Canada, even with no status. Just don’t make me go back there and be tortured,” Sumaida told the Star. “It is just not fair to leave somebody in limbo for 27 years. We are not animals.”Sumaida was born in 1965, the son of Ali Mahmoud Sumaida, a trusted member of Hussein’s Baathist party and a former diplomat under the regime. The younger Sumaida attended school in England and knew the notorious Iraqi leader’s sons, Uday and Qusay.For many years, he was an informant for the Iraqi secret police, the “Mukhabarat” and spied on members of the Al Da’wa opposition party in the United Kingdom, according to the Federal Court decision in his previous removal proceedings in 2005.He acted as a “mole” and personal ...
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