Sampson Jalloh fights to stay in Canada after refugee board ties him to bloody atrocities

A federal court judge has rejected the appeal of Liberian refugee claimant Sampson Jalloh, who's facing deportation after the Immigration and Refugee Board refused to believe he was an unwilling soldier in Charles Taylor's brutal rebel army in the 1990s.

The National Post reports Sampson, a 41-year-old Toronto resident, fears persecution if he's forced back to the West African country he fled in 1996.

But the refugee board, now backed by the court, doubted Jalloh's claim that he was forced to lure fellow members of his minority Mandingo ethnic group to their deaths at the hands of Taylor's rebels during Liberia's first civil war.

Jalloh said he was conscripted into the rebel force at age 22 after they tortured and murdered his father. During his four years with Taylor's rebels, Jalloh said he witnessed gruesome atrocities by child soldiers but was never armed and did not take part himself.

After a peace agreement ended the war, Jalloh said he fled to neighbouring Guinea, then to the Netherlands where he made an initial refugee claim before coming to Canada in 2006.

The board heard Jalloh told Dutch officials a different story than the one he told once he filed his refugee claim in Canada. He claimed he followed the advice of a people smuggler in lying to the Dutch, who nonetheless rejected his claim.

Once in Canada, Jalloh became involved in a scam where he and a partner tried to convince a Toronto businessman they'd smuggled $3 million out of Africa disguised as cardboard and needed money to convert it back to currency. He pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy but the conviction did not figure in his refugee board hearing, the Post said.

The board concluded Jalloh's participation in rebel atrocities and his failure to leave the group until after the war ended made him inadmissible to Canada.

Though he quibbled with the way the board reached its decision, Federal Court Justice James O'Reilly upheld it.

"The board's conclusion was intelligible, justified and transparent; it came within the range of defensible outcomes based on the facts and the law," O'Reilly said in his ruling.

Jalloh has other avenues of appeal against the board decision. His lawyer, Paul Vandervennen, said he's seeking a pre-removal assessment to determine if he faces undue danger if he's deported back to his native country.

Liberia, which has endured two bloody wars in the last two decades, is in a state of fragile peace monitored by a United Nations security force, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook.

Taylor is on trial at the the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague for war crimes committed in that country while he was Liberia's president in the late 1990s. A verdict is scheduled to be handed down April 26.