Ahmed Zaoui has been in prison for almost two years. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Ahmed Zaoui has been in prison for almost two years. Picture / Brett Phibbs

By CHRIS BARTON

"Send the bastard home," shouts a passing driver to a cluster of Amnesty International demonstrators at the top of Nelson St. It's a common suggestion, with a few unprintable variations.

The gateway to Auckland's Spaghetti Junction is a tangle of motorists and emotions - anger and antagonism threaded with lonely cries of "freedom" and "fair trial". All this over an Algerian Muslim who came here on a false passport seeking asylum.

"Man imprisoned without trial for two years". It's the sort of headline you might expect in countries run by oppressive regimes. But surely not in New Zealand?

Perhaps even more surprising is that Helen Clark's Labour Government made it so. Next month, Ahmed Zaoui will have been locked up without trial for two years. His prospects for release look bleak.

"This is a man sitting in prison and there is no horizon," Zaoui's lawyer, Deborah Manning, tells an audience gathered to hear a Zaoui lecture - Clash of Civilisations - delivered in absentia at Auckland University in mid October. "Mr Zaoui's case is a story about the fragility of our democracy."

Her argument hinges on human rights: that Zaoui's imprisonment is patently undemocratic.

Our Security Intelligence Service (SIS) won't say why it issued a security risk certificate on Zaoui in March last year and locked him up - it's classified.

But Zaoui's Catch-22 predicament has fomented all kinds of reactions and explanations - a seething mix of fact with fiction, conspiracy theory, speculation and grains of truth. Here are some of them:

1. There is a terrorist in our midst. To go with this one, you have to believe an al Qaeda cell is about to set up shop in Auckland. It was sparked in December 2002 when news of Zaoui's arrival here was leaked to the Herald - a leak contravening the Immigration Act, which prohibits publicising information about refugee claims.

In a post-September 11 climate, the terrorist story had, as they say, legs. Media organisations including the Herald pursued it vigorously. It's now clear that many of the earlier stories got it hopelessly wrong - a consequence of using unsubstantiated internet-based reports.

But there is information out there. And even with checking, the information could, and did, lead many to believe that Zaoui was "a terrorist on the run". That his name was "linked to terrorist cells that have carried out bombings, beheadings and throat-slitting from Algeria to France". (See 2.) And, if you believe everything you read, that Zaoui had links with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda networks in Asia.