The young farmer from the Indian Ocean country of Sri Lanka wanted only to get to Canada to escape the torture. Instead, he has landed in the north Los Angeles suburb of Lancaster.
Accused of being a terrorist in his native country, Ahilan Nadarajah left in September 2001 and was guided by smugglers through Thailand, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. He intended to sneak into the United States on his way to Toronto but was arrested at the border.
He was twice granted political asylum by a U.S. immigration judge, but the Department of Homeland Security branded him a national security threat. He spent nearly 4 1/2 years in a U.S. jail while the government tried to deport him to Sri Lanka.
He was freed March 21 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called his lengthy detention illegal in a bristling 37-page opinion that took aim at the Bush administration's controversial practice of indefinitely detaining immigrants accused of terrorism but not charged. The three-judge panel said keeping him jailed violated a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against indefinite detention in immigration cases.
The court's unanimous ruling called Nadarajah's jailing illegal and unreasonable and said the government's arguments were "patently absurd," "implausible" and "baffling."
The 26-year-old postmaster's son remains remarkably free of animosity toward the United States, despite having been locked up in solitary for five months.
"Although I believe I was jailed unjustly, I'm grateful because the American government saved my life by not sending me back," Nadarajah said in an interview last week at a Sri Lankan restaurant in Lancaster. The chances are slim he will be allowed into Canada, where he intended to seek asylum, and the U.S. probably will become his home. Much of the evidence the U.S. government used to label Nadarajah a member of the Tamil Tigers, which the State Department has branded as terrorist, came from an informant working for Canadian law enforcement.
The Sri Lankan government has been at war for two decades with the Tamil Tigers, which seeks an independent state for ethnic Tamils. Both sides have committed human rights abuses, including torture, kidnappings and politically motivated killings, according to Amnesty International.
