Family of Canadian Muslim killed in Chechnya still
looking for answers
at 19:03 on February 6, 2005, EST.

http://www.940news.com/news.php?cat=9&id=n020633A

VANCOUVER (CP) - On some level Nasr Abubaker is
getting on with his life.

He's back at his job with Federal Express, fulfilling
his role as head of a household that has struggled to
build a new life in Canada after fleeing war-torn
Eritrea as refugees two decades ago.

But there's a surreal quality to it all, daily life
carrying on above an undiscovered truth he and his
family can't seem to touch.

It's been five months since Russian television
featured pictures of several bloody corpses officials
claimed were Muslim militants killed in fighting with
Russian special forces in the breakaway republic of
Chechnya.

One of them was identified as Rudwan Khalil Abubaker,
26, of Vancouver, one of Nasr's five younger brothers.
Russian authorities described hium as an explosives
expert.

As proof, they displayed his Canadian passport and
B.C. driver's licence. The swollen, bearded face
hardly resembled the slim, clean-shaven young man
known as Rudwan Khalil - Raider to his friends.

That news last Oct. 8 began the unraveling of the
Abubaker family's world, planting a question that
still eats like acid through its fabric: how could
Raider's worldly Canadian lifestyle take an
inexplicable lurch toward violent Muslim
fundamentalism?

"It is just like a dream to me, things I will never
understand," says Nasr, sipping an Italian orange soda
at a Commercial Drive cafe.

"We hear these things in the news only. You don't even
think this will come to you."

Russian officials insist Khalil was among a group of
four fighters killed in an ambush. The body's identity
was never been confirmed. A fingerprint comparison
proved inconclusive and the Russians have refused to
exhume the body to produce a DNA sample.

Nasr, 36, has come to a kind of acceptance his brother
is dead but rejects any notion Raider was willingly
involved with the Chechen insurgency.

"My brother's not that type of person, you know," he
says. "I can say that my brother's just been misled or
kidnapped or befriended with people who are either
working for Russians or working for other groups. We
don't know."

Raider's commitment wasn't to Islamism, says Nasr. It
was to his family, which fled to Sudan during
Eritrea's long, bloody and ultimately successful
struggle for independence against Ethiopia.

Nasr arrived in Canada first in 1987 after a stint in
an Egyptian refugee camp. The rest of the children and
their mother trickled in over the next few years.
Their father, an accountant, settled in Saudi Arabia.

The family also witnessed the ravages of Eritrean
insurgency.

"War has damaged me, like losing friends," says Nasr.
"I've seen the price of war. I don't like to go back
to it. You learn from your experience. There's more to
life than carrying guns and doing crazy things."

In their East African homeland Muslims, Christians and
Jews lived side by side, says Nasr. There's room for
prayer but not fundamentalism.

"We in my family, we take Islam as religion, we don't
take it as politics," he says. "It's none of our
business. It doesn't put food on our plate."

Raider, who shared a room with Nasr in their home, was
aware of his obligations to the family.

"He always says to me, don't worry, when I finish my
school I'm going to come and step to the plate," says
Nasr.

There was no sign, he says, that Raider had veered
towards fundamentalism.

"He was sleeping with me. I could have noticed that. I
would have been the first person to face my brother
and say what's going on? But I never seen those
things."

Khalil was enrolled in a plastics technology course at
the B.C. Institute of Technology due to start last
September.

Instead, he interrupted a visit to a cousin in Dubai
and, with a friend from Vancouver, hopped a flight to
Dagestan in late August ostensibly to attend a
friend's wedding in Azarbaijan, both of which border
on Chechnya. He took none of his bags, his brother
says.

The friend, Kamal Elbahja, 22, of suburban Maple
Ridge, hasn't been heard from since, and neither has
the Azari bridegroom, who also once worked at a
Vancouver visa brokerage.

Elbahja's family has also learned nothing in the
ensuing months about what happened to the
Moroccan-born Canadian.

Nasr Abubaker suspects a coverup but has no evidence
other than suspicion. Why for instance would a
guerrilla fighter be carrying his real passport and
driver's licence, he asks.

A Chechen guerrilla leader claimed Khalil as a
martyred fighter in an interview with the insurgency's
own news service but appeared to have no first-hand
knowledge of him.

The description of Raider as an explosives expert is
also laughable, Nasr adds.

"The guy can't cut an onion; he can't even cook. Where
did he learn, my brother, in the basement of my house?

"To me, if these kids had any intention to do these
things, it really doesn't click with his morality.
It's the way we brought him (up). He knew what we've
been through in life."

Rudwan Khalil worked at a Vancouver clothing store and
sometimes moonlighted as a model and movie extra. He
and Elbahja, a lumber-mill worker, loved to play
soccer.

"He was young but he was very responsible," says Nasr.
"A responsible man would never go through what he put
us through, no way."

They both did attend, along with Rudwan's older
brother Amir, a mosque about a block from the
Abubakers' East Vancouver home.

Dar al-Madinah Islamic Centre is run by Sheik Younus
Kathrada. After Khalil's reported death, Kathrada was
exposed for lecturing to followers about the virtues
of Islamic holy war - jihad - and that Jews were
brothers of monkeys and swine.

Kathrada now is the target of a hate-crimes
investigation but Nasr says he does not want that to
distract from the search for the truth of what
happened to his brother.

Just where that search stands is hard to gauge. The
Department of Foreign Affairs, which initially sent a
foreign service officer to Moscow, has said nothing
since the Russians rejected the DNA request last
November.

A spokeswoman on Friday said all information about the
case now must come through the Abubaker family's
lawyer.

For all his protestations, Nasr seems ready to accept
his brother might have chosen his fate, if that will
help end the gnawing uncertainty. He cites an East
African saying, loosely translated, "A stick of truth
never breaks."

"It's completely wounded the family," he says. "We
talk but not a lot. It's one of the hardest things
that I've been through. My mom is hurt a lot.

"There's a lot of silence. The emotional pain of it is
so deep, I don't know how to explain it to you."




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