http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Paternity+test+throws+doubt+into+highly+publicized+marriage+fraud/6612614/story.html?goback=%2Egde_112681_member_114963676
It was the most highly-publicized case of “marriage fraud” in recent memory: a Canadian woman abandoned by her Guinean husband only a month after he arrived in this country, the revelation that he had previously fathered a child in Africa, and his subsequent deportation for not declaring the existence of a dependent. But paternity tests may now show that the so-called fraudster was in fact not the child’s father — and that the alleged cad may have been exiled from his new life without good reason.
Eight days before Fodé Mohamed “Akra” Soumah left for his homeland in February, paternity test results were given to both the Canadian Border Services Agency and Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) officials. And Soumah’s second Canadian wife, Cassandre Blier, questions why no stay of deportation was granted so this new evidence could be reviewed.
The couple hired a top paternity testing company to conduct independent tests when government officials would not do their own testing.
“This was the big piece of evidence no one bothered to get,” says Blier. “He is not the guy they say he is. He was telling the truth. He should not have been deported for immigration fraud.”
Soumah was branded a “marriage fraudster” after his first Canadian wife, Lainie Towell, mounted an aggressive campaign to have him exposed.
Towell, a dancer and performance artist, alleged she was duped by Soumah into marrying him so he could come to Canada. They married in Guinea in April 2007. He arrived on New Year’s Eve of that year, but left Towell 29 days later.
In 2009, an Immigration and Refugee Board judge found there wasn’t enough evidence to find Soumah guilty of deceiving Towell to gain permanent residency. He noted that Towell and Soumah had a long romance in Guinea, and that it was Towell who had proposed to Soumah, 10 years her junior.
The judge instead found that the marriage likely broke up after Soumah arrived because Towell found emails to her new husband suggesting that he had fathered a son in Africa with another woman, a teenage dancer named “Bijou” that they had both known.
Soumah admitted to having a one-night stand before his marriage with the dancer, and that she’d told others he was the father. But she had been involved with two other men around the same time and he doubted he was the father. Soumah acknowledged sending emails to a friend that appeared to say he was the father, but claimed it was due to a language mistake. He wrote them in French, when his first language is Susu. Though Soumah’s parents had taken in the mother and child, he said they had done so for “humanitarian reasons.”
He has claimed that when he left Towell only a month after their marriage, he did so because she was angry and was threatening him. When he called Towell several weeks later asking to return to try to mend the relationship, she said no. She was by then already convinced she’d been had.
The judge ruled that Soumah “made a false representation” by not declaring the existence of a dependent child. He was ordered deported.
Soumah protested that he was not the father and filed an appeal.
Towell, meanwhile, donned her white wedding gown for a second time, strapped a red door to her back, and walked to Parliament Hill. On the door she wrote, “Mr. Immigration Minister, it’s getting heavy.”
She wrote that her “performance symbolized how my marriage was simply a doorway into Canada for Akra.”
Even though the judge did not rule that Soumah used Towell to sneak into Canada, she told reporters she was a victim of “marriage fraud” and she wanted the federal government to relieve her financial obligations as her husband’s immigration sponsor.
The story, picture and accusations against Soumah made news across the country, including in the Citizen. Victims of marriage fraud turned to Towell for help and advice, and advocacy groups demanded Immigration Minister Jason Kenney bring in regulatory changes to make it more difficult to use fraudulent marriage as a means to enter Canada.
Towell became the champion of marriage fraud victims, and refashioned herself professionally as a “hoopla guru,” offering clients her expertise at staging publicity stunts.
But even while Soumah’s first marriage was unravelling so publicly, he had quietly begun building a life for himself in Canada — one that included another romance.
**
Blier, communications coordinator for World University Services of Canada, says she and Soumah fell for each other 16 months after his relationship with Towell ended. They met in an elementary school gym in Gatineau where she was taking night-school drumming classes. She was asked by one of the other instructors to give a ride home to Soumah, who worked as a maintenance man at Galeries de Hull and taught drumming in his free time.
Although Blier knew she was risking her heart, and her reputation, by getting involved with a man involved in such a public deportation case, she took his story at “face value.”
“He was just this really sweet, wise, hard-working guy.”
He met her parents, Soumah filed for a divorce, and they moved in together, knowing he could be deported at any time. When the appeal upheld the original ruling against him, they fought to clear his name.
Soumah called the child’s mother and asked for an affidavit confirming he was not the father, which she supplied.
But, says Blier, “We learned that the boyfriend she was living with, one of the potential fathers, got really mad and beat her seriously.
“We didn’t want to cause more problems for her so we forgot about the [paternity] test and hoped the affidavit was enough.”
Four hundred supporters also signed a petition declaring the valuable contributions Soumah had made to his community in Canada and urging the government to let him stay.
Blier applied to become Soumah’s new sponsor so he could gain permanent residency. But despite the Quebec government supporting Blier’s application, Soumah learned in January that he was about to be deported.
Desperate, the couple asked the mother to submit her son to DNA tests. She agreed, and also provided her own sample to compare with Soumah’s DNA.
The tests were conducted by Orchid Cellmark, considered Canada’s most credible paternity testing service and one used frequently by the federal government. Soumah and Blier also requested photographs, fingerprints, official identifications, and a detailed explanation of how the tests were conducted.
The tests concluded with 100-per-cent certainty that Soumah was not the father of the child in Africa.
Identification provided by the mother also shows that in 2007 she was 18, not 15, as Towell asserted.
This new evidence acquired, the couple were hopeful the deportation, eight days away, would be halted. They faxed, then hand-delivered the results to CIC and border services officials. They also went ahead with a planned marriage, to make their lengthy common-law relationship official. “And something joyous in the face of all of this stress,” says Blier.
But despite repeated phone calls and emails, they never got a response to the paternity test. Reluctantly, the couple bought the $2600 plane ticket to Africa they feared Soumah would need, and enlisted the assistance of immigration lawyer Denis Roumestan to seek a last-minute stay of deportation so that the new evidence could be reviewed.
The couple drove to Montreal, checking in with Roumestan every few minutes. They were so convinced the test results would change everything for Soumah, they didn’t really believe he would have to board the flight.
But one minute before the plane was due to take off, Soumah’s phone rang. It was Roumestan, calling to say that he had not been granted a stay of deportation. Soumah would have to return to Guinea.
**
Five days after Soumah and Blier were separated, she received a letter from a CIC official telling her the paternity test results didn’t change the decision but they could be used when she sponsors him to return to Canada.
Contacted by the Citizen, CIC said Friday it has not yet determined if the paternity test is “legitimate.”
“CIC only accepts DNA tests from accredited laboratories performed under CIC supervision. This protocol was not followed in this case,” says Tracie LeBlanc, CIC communication advisor. (Soumah signed a consent form following a request from the Citizen so CIC could speak about his case.)
LeBlanc also said Soumah had given inconsistent statements about his relationship with the child in Guinea during his hearings and appeals.
“Mr. Soumah admitted to being the father to his former spouse, that the child and his mother moved in with Mr. Soumah’s parents in Guinea, that the affidavit that the mother of the child signed was not credible, and that a series of emails with friends and family appeared to confirm his paternity.”
Soumah is now in Guinea, with its unemployment rate of 60 per cent, looking for a job. And Blier is trying to find a way to get him back here. When you get an “exclusion order” from Canada, you must wait for two years to re-apply with a new sponsor.
Blier says that because of a 24-month backlog of applications to the Embassy in Senegal, where all applications from West Africa are handled, it could be three years before her husband is permitted to return.
She is 29 and he is 30. They are hoping to start a family.
Roumestan has until May 15 to file another appeal asking the case to be reopened.
Towell, meanwhile, questions the validity of the paternity test results. Contacted by the Citizen, she asks if the right people were tested, and why the couple waited until the last minute to get the tests.
It’s impossible not to feel for Towell, whose hopes for lasting love and marriage turned so sour. She still believes Soumah used her to gain entry to Canada.
“I recognize the fact that this story was very much in the public eye. It became precedent-setting and drew attention. But at the same time, the (immigration hearing and deportation) process was still done correctly from A to Z,” Towell says.
“Even if he were to appear here tomorrow and live the rest of his life in Canada, it doesn’t take away what I lived through and the story I am telling you,” Towell adds. “The last thing I wanted to do was throw my heart on the line and come across as an angry wife out to get revenge.”
Last month, Towell self-published an account of her relationship with Soumah, a book called How To Catch An African Chicken: A Canadian Woman’s Outrageous but True Story of Marriage Fraud.
Prior to its publication, Blier wrote to Towell asking for the falsehoods to be corrected. Towell says she is “thinking about amending” some parts.
CIC’s LeBlanc says Towell’s “actions” have been “credited with bringing the issue of marriage fraud to light.”
The immigration department subsequently enlisted border services enforcement officers to investigate more cases of alleged marriage fraud.
And last year, Kenney proposed new regulatory measures to prevent people from using marriages of convenience to circumvent Canada’s immigration laws. The proposed laws include a five-year ban on the sponsored spouse being able to sponsor another mate in order to stop people from engaging in cyclical marry-sponsor-divorce schemes. There would also be a two-year conditional residency requirement to ensure relationships were legitimate before granting permanent residence to the sponsored spouse. These changes are under review.
In the meantime, Soumah and Blier are fighting to be together, and counting the days until she can afford a flight to go visit her husband.
Says Roumestan: “Someone should correct the injustice that has been done to Fodé Mohamed Soumah and his wife. For years the media has talked about him as a fraudster, which is not the case. Ruining the reputation of Mr. Soumah has to stop at some point.”
And Blier thinks about the evidence the couple secured, the years they’ve spent together, and wonders how it’s come to this.
“In 2012, considering these facts,” she says, “how can anyone still say that Fodé Mohamed Soumah is a ‘marriage fraudster?’”
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Paternity+test+throws+doubt+into+highly+publicized+marriage+fraud+deportation/6612614/story.html#ixzz1ulrevGqi
It was the most highly-publicized case of “marriage fraud” in recent memory: a Canadian woman abandoned by her Guinean husband only a month after he arrived in this country, the revelation that he had previously fathered a child in Africa, and his subsequent deportation for not declaring the existence of a dependent. But paternity tests may now show that the so-called fraudster was in fact not the child’s father — and that the alleged cad may have been exiled from his new life without good reason.
Eight days before Fodé Mohamed “Akra” Soumah left for his homeland in February, paternity test results were given to both the Canadian Border Services Agency and Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) officials. And Soumah’s second Canadian wife, Cassandre Blier, questions why no stay of deportation was granted so this new evidence could be reviewed.
The couple hired a top paternity testing company to conduct independent tests when government officials would not do their own testing.
“This was the big piece of evidence no one bothered to get,” says Blier. “He is not the guy they say he is. He was telling the truth. He should not have been deported for immigration fraud.”
Soumah was branded a “marriage fraudster” after his first Canadian wife, Lainie Towell, mounted an aggressive campaign to have him exposed.
Towell, a dancer and performance artist, alleged she was duped by Soumah into marrying him so he could come to Canada. They married in Guinea in April 2007. He arrived on New Year’s Eve of that year, but left Towell 29 days later.
In 2009, an Immigration and Refugee Board judge found there wasn’t enough evidence to find Soumah guilty of deceiving Towell to gain permanent residency. He noted that Towell and Soumah had a long romance in Guinea, and that it was Towell who had proposed to Soumah, 10 years her junior.
The judge instead found that the marriage likely broke up after Soumah arrived because Towell found emails to her new husband suggesting that he had fathered a son in Africa with another woman, a teenage dancer named “Bijou” that they had both known.
Soumah admitted to having a one-night stand before his marriage with the dancer, and that she’d told others he was the father. But she had been involved with two other men around the same time and he doubted he was the father. Soumah acknowledged sending emails to a friend that appeared to say he was the father, but claimed it was due to a language mistake. He wrote them in French, when his first language is Susu. Though Soumah’s parents had taken in the mother and child, he said they had done so for “humanitarian reasons.”
He has claimed that when he left Towell only a month after their marriage, he did so because she was angry and was threatening him. When he called Towell several weeks later asking to return to try to mend the relationship, she said no. She was by then already convinced she’d been had.
The judge ruled that Soumah “made a false representation” by not declaring the existence of a dependent child. He was ordered deported.
Soumah protested that he was not the father and filed an appeal.
Towell, meanwhile, donned her white wedding gown for a second time, strapped a red door to her back, and walked to Parliament Hill. On the door she wrote, “Mr. Immigration Minister, it’s getting heavy.”
She wrote that her “performance symbolized how my marriage was simply a doorway into Canada for Akra.”
Even though the judge did not rule that Soumah used Towell to sneak into Canada, she told reporters she was a victim of “marriage fraud” and she wanted the federal government to relieve her financial obligations as her husband’s immigration sponsor.
The story, picture and accusations against Soumah made news across the country, including in the Citizen. Victims of marriage fraud turned to Towell for help and advice, and advocacy groups demanded Immigration Minister Jason Kenney bring in regulatory changes to make it more difficult to use fraudulent marriage as a means to enter Canada.
Towell became the champion of marriage fraud victims, and refashioned herself professionally as a “hoopla guru,” offering clients her expertise at staging publicity stunts.
But even while Soumah’s first marriage was unravelling so publicly, he had quietly begun building a life for himself in Canada — one that included another romance.
**
Blier, communications coordinator for World University Services of Canada, says she and Soumah fell for each other 16 months after his relationship with Towell ended. They met in an elementary school gym in Gatineau where she was taking night-school drumming classes. She was asked by one of the other instructors to give a ride home to Soumah, who worked as a maintenance man at Galeries de Hull and taught drumming in his free time.
Although Blier knew she was risking her heart, and her reputation, by getting involved with a man involved in such a public deportation case, she took his story at “face value.”
“He was just this really sweet, wise, hard-working guy.”
He met her parents, Soumah filed for a divorce, and they moved in together, knowing he could be deported at any time. When the appeal upheld the original ruling against him, they fought to clear his name.
Soumah called the child’s mother and asked for an affidavit confirming he was not the father, which she supplied.
But, says Blier, “We learned that the boyfriend she was living with, one of the potential fathers, got really mad and beat her seriously.
“We didn’t want to cause more problems for her so we forgot about the [paternity] test and hoped the affidavit was enough.”
Four hundred supporters also signed a petition declaring the valuable contributions Soumah had made to his community in Canada and urging the government to let him stay.
Blier applied to become Soumah’s new sponsor so he could gain permanent residency. But despite the Quebec government supporting Blier’s application, Soumah learned in January that he was about to be deported.
Desperate, the couple asked the mother to submit her son to DNA tests. She agreed, and also provided her own sample to compare with Soumah’s DNA.
The tests were conducted by Orchid Cellmark, considered Canada’s most credible paternity testing service and one used frequently by the federal government. Soumah and Blier also requested photographs, fingerprints, official identifications, and a detailed explanation of how the tests were conducted.
The tests concluded with 100-per-cent certainty that Soumah was not the father of the child in Africa.
Identification provided by the mother also shows that in 2007 she was 18, not 15, as Towell asserted.
This new evidence acquired, the couple were hopeful the deportation, eight days away, would be halted. They faxed, then hand-delivered the results to CIC and border services officials. They also went ahead with a planned marriage, to make their lengthy common-law relationship official. “And something joyous in the face of all of this stress,” says Blier.
But despite repeated phone calls and emails, they never got a response to the paternity test. Reluctantly, the couple bought the $2600 plane ticket to Africa they feared Soumah would need, and enlisted the assistance of immigration lawyer Denis Roumestan to seek a last-minute stay of deportation so that the new evidence could be reviewed.
The couple drove to Montreal, checking in with Roumestan every few minutes. They were so convinced the test results would change everything for Soumah, they didn’t really believe he would have to board the flight.
But one minute before the plane was due to take off, Soumah’s phone rang. It was Roumestan, calling to say that he had not been granted a stay of deportation. Soumah would have to return to Guinea.
**
Five days after Soumah and Blier were separated, she received a letter from a CIC official telling her the paternity test results didn’t change the decision but they could be used when she sponsors him to return to Canada.
Contacted by the Citizen, CIC said Friday it has not yet determined if the paternity test is “legitimate.”
“CIC only accepts DNA tests from accredited laboratories performed under CIC supervision. This protocol was not followed in this case,” says Tracie LeBlanc, CIC communication advisor. (Soumah signed a consent form following a request from the Citizen so CIC could speak about his case.)
LeBlanc also said Soumah had given inconsistent statements about his relationship with the child in Guinea during his hearings and appeals.
“Mr. Soumah admitted to being the father to his former spouse, that the child and his mother moved in with Mr. Soumah’s parents in Guinea, that the affidavit that the mother of the child signed was not credible, and that a series of emails with friends and family appeared to confirm his paternity.”
Soumah is now in Guinea, with its unemployment rate of 60 per cent, looking for a job. And Blier is trying to find a way to get him back here. When you get an “exclusion order” from Canada, you must wait for two years to re-apply with a new sponsor.
Blier says that because of a 24-month backlog of applications to the Embassy in Senegal, where all applications from West Africa are handled, it could be three years before her husband is permitted to return.
She is 29 and he is 30. They are hoping to start a family.
Roumestan has until May 15 to file another appeal asking the case to be reopened.
Towell, meanwhile, questions the validity of the paternity test results. Contacted by the Citizen, she asks if the right people were tested, and why the couple waited until the last minute to get the tests.
It’s impossible not to feel for Towell, whose hopes for lasting love and marriage turned so sour. She still believes Soumah used her to gain entry to Canada.
“I recognize the fact that this story was very much in the public eye. It became precedent-setting and drew attention. But at the same time, the (immigration hearing and deportation) process was still done correctly from A to Z,” Towell says.
“Even if he were to appear here tomorrow and live the rest of his life in Canada, it doesn’t take away what I lived through and the story I am telling you,” Towell adds. “The last thing I wanted to do was throw my heart on the line and come across as an angry wife out to get revenge.”
Last month, Towell self-published an account of her relationship with Soumah, a book called How To Catch An African Chicken: A Canadian Woman’s Outrageous but True Story of Marriage Fraud.
Prior to its publication, Blier wrote to Towell asking for the falsehoods to be corrected. Towell says she is “thinking about amending” some parts.
CIC’s LeBlanc says Towell’s “actions” have been “credited with bringing the issue of marriage fraud to light.”
The immigration department subsequently enlisted border services enforcement officers to investigate more cases of alleged marriage fraud.
And last year, Kenney proposed new regulatory measures to prevent people from using marriages of convenience to circumvent Canada’s immigration laws. The proposed laws include a five-year ban on the sponsored spouse being able to sponsor another mate in order to stop people from engaging in cyclical marry-sponsor-divorce schemes. There would also be a two-year conditional residency requirement to ensure relationships were legitimate before granting permanent residence to the sponsored spouse. These changes are under review.
In the meantime, Soumah and Blier are fighting to be together, and counting the days until she can afford a flight to go visit her husband.
Says Roumestan: “Someone should correct the injustice that has been done to Fodé Mohamed Soumah and his wife. For years the media has talked about him as a fraudster, which is not the case. Ruining the reputation of Mr. Soumah has to stop at some point.”
And Blier thinks about the evidence the couple secured, the years they’ve spent together, and wonders how it’s come to this.
“In 2012, considering these facts,” she says, “how can anyone still say that Fodé Mohamed Soumah is a ‘marriage fraudster?’”
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Paternity+test+throws+doubt+into+highly+publicized+marriage+fraud+deportation/6612614/story.html#ixzz1ulrevGqi
