TORONTO -- Keeping an Egyptian refugee in jail for almost four years without charge or trial constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, his lawyers said yesterday. Mohammad Mahjoub was arrested in June 2000 and has been held at the Toronto West Detention Centre, a jail that normally houses short-term inmates and has been dubbed Canada's Guantanamo Bay after the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

"He should be released," John Norris, one of his lawyers, said as Mahjoub's week-long bail hearing kicked off.

Canadian security officials argue Mahjoub, 44, is linked to the Vanguards of Conquest, Muslim extremists with ties to the terrorist group al-Jihad.

The evidence has been kept secret, even from his lawyers, and any proof of his terrorism links has not been tested in a Canadian court.

Accepted as a refugee in Canada in 1996, Mahjoub denies terrorist ties and is fighting deportation on the grounds he would again face torture if returned to Egypt, where he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in absentia for terrorism links.

Mahjoub has admitted having met Osama bin Laden several times. However, he says it was while he worked at an agricultural plant in Sudan in 1992 that was owned by the al-Qaida leader, who at the time was an American ally.

Among yesterday's witnesses was his wife of eight years, Mona Elfouli, who described the impact his detention has had on her and their two young children.

Almost all their contract since Mahjoub was snatched by agents as he went to work has been through a Plexiglas screen by telephone.

"It was very, very difficult for me and the children," Elfouli told Federal Court Justice Eleanor Dawson, dabbing her eyes.

"Are they punishing the children or what? They feel sad."

At one point after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S., her husband was moved into segregation for seven months.

At other times, she and the children would arrive for an appointment only to be told they couldn't see him.

The Grade 1 pupil has become constantly agitated and anxious about any separation from her, said Elfouli, who also has a four-year-old in junior kindergarten.

"He needs to see his father," she testified as her husband, clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, occasionally rubbed his eyes and stroked his bushy black beard from the prisoner box a few metres away.

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