OTTAWA - A U.S. appeals court will revisit a lawsuit filed by Ottawa engineer Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria after he was shipped overseas by American authorities.
The court dismissed an appeal from Arar in June.
It has now issued what Arar's lawyers call an extremely rare decision to take a second look at the case without prompting from the parties involved.
Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained at New York's JFK Airport in September 2002 and later whisked out of the country as a terrorism suspect, winding up in a grim Damascus prison cell.
Under torture, he gave false confessions to Syrian military intelligence about alleged ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
A Canadian inquiry said faulty information the RCMP passed to the United States likely led to Arar's year-long nightmare.
