Canadian border officer denies trying to help FBI by questioning Meng Wanzhou about Iran

Sanjit Dhillon said his questions were solely intended to assess the Huawei executive’s admissibility to Canada

But Meng’s lawyers depict the questioning as part of wrongful evidence-gathering orchestrated by US law enforcement

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Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer, leaving her home in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Wednesday to attend an evidentiary hearing in her extradition case. Photo: The Canadian Press via AP

Published: 5:59am, 19 Nov 2020Updated: 5:53am, 25 Dec 2021

A Canadian border officer who asked Meng Wanzhou about Huawei Technologies’ business dealings in Iran has repeatedly denied doing so on behalf of Canadian police or US law enforcers.

Sanjit Dhillon, a Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) superintendent, came under intense cross-examination from Mona Duckett, a lawyer for Meng, as the Huawei chief financial officer’s extradition case in front of Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes continued in Vancouver on Wednesday.

Duckett accused Dhillon of lying when he claimed that reading a Wikipedia article about Huawei informed his decision to ask Meng about Iran, dubbing this a “creation”. Instead, she contended, the questions were to help gather evidence for the US to prosecute Meng. Dhillon denied this.

He said that his questioning of Meng at Vancouver’s airport, in the hours before her arrest by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers on December 1, 2018, was only related to assessing her immigration admissibility, and that he was concerned about espionage in Canada.

Should she be extradited, Meng will faces charges in the US that she deceived HSBC bankers concerning Huawei’s dealings in Iran, in violation of sanctions imposed on the country. Photo: Reuters

But lawyers for Meng suggest that her questioning and the seizure of her electronic devices at the airport were part of a covert exercise to gather evidence on behalf of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, to use in the trial for which they sought Meng’s detention.