OTTAWA, 16 July 2003 — A senior Foreign Ministry official yesterday clarified an Agence France Presse report that Ottawa has warned its nationals to avoid travel to Saudi Arabia because of heightened tensions in the Middle East and the ongoing threat of terrorism.
“This is not true. We never used the word ‘warning’ while issuing a routine travel advisory,” Reynald Doiron, a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, told Arab News yesterday.
“We do not warn our citizens to travel or not to travel. Certainly we issue travel advisories off and on asking them to evaluate their own safety and security before traveling for business or any another reason,” he told Arab News.
Doiron conceded that Ottawa may have asked Canadian citizens to evaluate their need to travel to Saudi Arabia. “As far as I know, I have not seen such advisory. However, if there is one, it’s routine...nothing serious,” he said.
Dominque Gaughier, a spokesperson at the Foreign Affairs Minister’s office, did not know of any warning issued against traveling to Saudi Arabia this week.
However, she said Canadians are being cautioned to put their travel plans to Iran on hold because of the death in uncertain circumstances of photojournalist Zahra Kazemi.
She said an official statement advising Canadians to avoid traveling to Iran was likely to be issued yesterday afternoon. “You have to wait and see the travel advisory for Iran,” she told Arab News.
In another development, the Montreal-based son of the Canadian photojournalist who died in Iran, has called for his mother’s body to be exhumed after he was told that she had already been buried.
“During the night, an unknown, clandestine organization buried the cadaver of Kazemi, my mother,” Stephan Hachemi was quoted as saying by the Globe and Mail newspaper.
The information, from unnamed sources, throws into further confusion the fate of Zahra Kazemi, a 54-year-old Montrealer who died after Iranian security officials arrested her last month in Tehran.
Canadian officials said earlier yesterday that Kazemi’s body was kept in a morgue in Tehran. Reynald Doiron said last night that the government had heard reports that Kazemi had already been buried. “We ... have sought a response from the high levels of the Iranian government,” he said.
In Tehran, Iranian officials said they are taking the photojournalist’s death “very seriously” and that four Cabinet ministers have been ordered to investigate.
“It is necessary to clear [up] the ambiguities about the case and to find out if anyone is responsible for her death as soon as possible,” an official at the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa said yesterday.
Hachemi said he was told that a commission of the Iranian Parliament has concluded that his mother, a dual Iranian-Canadian citizen, was arrested around June 22 and taken four days later to Iran’s Ministry of Information.
By that time, she was already injured and was taken to hospital, where she died on Friday after having a brain hemorrhage.
Hachemi accused Iranian authorities of a coverup, and said the four-minister commission was a sham.
“How could they have buried her body if we don’t know the reason for her death?” he asked. “We have to take out the body from the ground [to] know exactly what happened.”
Earlier yesterday, the federal government said it welcomes President Mohammed Khatami’s order for an investigation.
Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham, meanwhile, expressed his deep sorrow and regret at the news of the tragic death of the Canadian journalist.
— With input from Agencies
