Founded in 2001, Project O Canada was a Toronto-based anti-terrorism investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Created in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, subdivisions of the project named A-O Canada and C-O Canada were based in Ottawa and Montreal, RCMP Divisions A and C respectively. By December 2001, the RCMP was shifting its focus from gathering intelligence, to seeking information "in a manner suitable for court purposes". It was later criticised for bringing together forty members from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's (RCMP) Commercial Crimes, IPOC, and National Security Investigations branches, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Customs and Revenue Agency, Canada Border Services Agency, the Quebec and Ontario provincial police, and local officers from Hull, Gatineau and Ottawa. The team was composed almost entirely of individuals with no knowledge of intelligence gathering, Islam, or human rights issues, and was simply told to cooperate fully with the American Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency, turning over all information without hesitation. The project was ultimately found to have played a "central role" in the wrongful rendition and torture of Canadian citizens, including Maher Arar, who was tortured for ten months before being found innocent of the officers' claims that he was "suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement". First months Growing out of an earlier project begun in 1997, the 35-officer project initially focused on the actions and acquaintances of NGO-worker Ahmed Khadr, who was believed to be financially supporting Islamic militants in Afghanistan. They also investigated claims from local residents that a man who resembled Mohamed Atta had worked part-time at the Best Copy copy shop in downtown Toronto, seizing the store's records and investigating its customers, adding a number of them to an Interpol database. By October, the RCMP claimed to have identified 10-12 "al-Qaida suspects" in the city, and a month later reported they had "undertaken 24-hour surveillance of at least five suspected supporters of Osama bin Laden." Expansion of the project In October 2001, the RCMP's Toronto office met with Ottawa officers in Newmarket, Ontario and requested they form a Project A-O division. Its first task was to help Toronto by taking over the investigation of the electronics store owner Abdullah Almalki, who had worked for Human Concern International at the same time as Khadr. Almalki had been under surveillance by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service since he first met