Tahawar Hussain Rana, one of the key figures behind the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, has been convicted on terrorism charges and extradited to India from the US, but the Canadian government is fighting to revoke his citizenship. Among the reasons for the delay were changes to citizenship legislation under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which removed terrorism as a reason for such action.
While Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, has asked the federal court to revoke Rana’s citizenship, the case remains “unresolved,” Global News reported on Monday.
The 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai claimed the lives of 166 victims, not including the nine terrorists loyal to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group on Canada’s list of banned entities.
However, Rana’s citizenship cannot be revoked because in February 2016, Trudeau announced that his government had repealed parts of the citizenship law, including those that allowed immigration authorities to take such action if a person was proven to have engaged in terrorist activity.
This left IRCC with the option of trying to prove that Rana obtained Canadian citizenship through “deception.” He became a citizen in May 2001, but claimed in his application that he resided in Ottawa, the country’s capital. However, an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, showed that he spent almost that entire period in Chicago.
The outlet also said such cancellations routinely take a decade to process. The attempt to revoke Rana’s citizenship appears to have begun in May 2024.
“The fact that Canada has been inexplicably slow to revoke the citizenship of a convicted terrorist, even years after the security concerns surrounding him emerged, is a damning indictment of our immigration and citizenship system,” Joe Adam George, a national security analyst at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told the Hindustan Times. “The Tahawar Rana case exposes systemic failures in vetting, verification, enforcement and political accountability.”
“When an individual linked to one of the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks is able to obtain and retain Canadian citizenship through misrepresentation for decades, it raises serious doubts about whether our institutions can effectively address national security threats or be seen as a trusted and trusted partner in the fight against terrorism,” he added.
Rana, a former captain in the Pakistani army, worked with David Headley, a Pakistani American who remains in a US prison on charges related to the attacks. Rana, 65, was sentenced to prison in the United States in 2013 and was extradited to India in April last year, where he remains detained.
But it seems likely that it will take some time before he is stripped of his Canadian citizenship.
