A Canadian woman made an emotional return home to Toronto on Saturday after being stranded in Kenya since being denied exit in May because authorities alleged she was using someone else’s passport.
Overjoyed to return home after the three-month ordeal she called a “nightmare” finally came to an end, Suaad Haji Mohamud hugged her 12-year-old son tightly after arriving at the airport. She was only allowed to travel after DNA tests showing she was indeed Mohamed Hussein’s mother, proving her identity.
Mohamud’s ordeal began when she traveled to Kenya to visit her mother. When she sought to board a plane to return to Canada in May, Kenyan immigration officials arrested and detained her, accusing her of identity fraud because her lips appeared different than those on the photograph in her four-year-old passport.
After holding her for eight days, Kenyan authorities freed the 31-year-old woman on bail.
“Really it is a bad experience. I have never been in jail, even in my own country,” she said on Wednesday.
Her Kenyan lawyer, Lucas Naikuni, will file a complaint against the Kenyan and Canadian governments, and against KLM airlines, CBC public TV reported.
Mohamud’s case has sparked a debate in Canada, where media have highlighted several cases of Canadian citizens who were held or faced difficulties abroad without Ottawa stepping in to help.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has vowed to launch an investigation into the Canada Border Services Agency handled Mohamud’s case.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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