Canadian accused of terror links released from Mauritanian prison
Aaron Yoon, the 24-year-old Canadian who has been held in a Mauritanian prison since 2011 on terror-related charges, has been released.
Yoon was accused by Mauritanian authorities of having links to two Canadians involved in an attack on an Algerian gas plant in January that ended with the deaths of 37 hostages and 29 attackers.
He is being interviewed by Mauritanian intelligence officials and will soon be deported to Canada, travelling on a temporary passport he has been given by authorities, CBC's Adrienne Arsenault reported.
"He's now free," Arsenault said. "The plan, it seems, is to get him back to Canada in the next two days."
Yoon's release was facilitated by Canadian diplomats in Morocco, Arsenault said.
The RCMP aren't commenting, but Arsenault said Canadian security officials "might want to have a conversation" with him when he arrives in Canada.
Yoon was sentenced to two years in prison last July after being convicted of having ties to a terrorist group and of posing a danger to national security. Prosecutors in the northeast African country had asked a court this May to extend his sentence to 10 years.
The Korean-Canadian is accused of travelling to Morocco, which borders Algeria, with Ali Medlej and Xris Katsiroubas, who attended the same high school as Yoon in London, Ont. The RCMP have confirmed that Medlej and Katsiroubas were among the dead attackers found at the Tigantourine gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria, that was attacked by an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group called the Masked Brigade.
Yoon has said he travelled to the North African region for religious study and that he didn't know how Medlej and Katsiroubas had become linked with militants. He told Amnesty International that he first heard of the gas plant attack while in prison.
He told the human rights organization that he was tortured in prison and forced to give a false confession. Amnesty International called his claims "certainly credible and completely consistent with the wider pattern that we've known to be the case for quite some time in Mauritania."
Before his arrest, Yoon attended a religious school in Mauritania, reportedly with Americans and Europeans, studying the Qur'an. Yoon was raised a Catholic but converted to Islam a year before graduating from London South Collegiate Institute.
He told Arsenault earlier this year that he had kept his arrest from his family and friends because he was embarrassed, and the news came as a shock to his relatives, who said they had no idea he was in prison when reached by the CBC in April of this year.
