China frees Canada's 'two Michaels', jailed for more than 1,000 days, after Huawei's Meng cuts deal [View all]
Source: Washington Post
China frees Canada’s ‘two Michaels’, jailed for more than 1,000 days, after Huawei’s Meng cuts deal with U.S.
TORONTO — The two Canadians imprisoned in China for 1,020 days in what Western officials decried a blatant display of “hostage diplomacy” have been released from prison and are “on their way home,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Friday.
The release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — known here as the “two Michaels” — came hours after Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, reached a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that allowed her to return to China in exchange for acknowledging some wrongdoing in a criminal case.
Canadian officials arrested Meng, 49, in Vancouver in December 2018, at the behest of U.S. officials who sought her extradition on bank and wire fraud charges related to allegations that she misled a bank about Huawei’s relationship with a subsidiary in Iran. Several days later, China detained Kovrig and Spavor in what was widely seen as tit-for-tat retaliation — and sent ties between Ottawa and Beijing into a sharp nosedive.
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Trudeau, whose minority government was returned to office this week after a snap election, said in Ottawa that Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Spavor, a businessman, had boarded a plane leaving China at 7:30 p.m. Ottawa time. They were accompanied by Canada’s ambassador to China.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/24/canada-two-michaels-china-huawei/
The two political hostages are free. tRump did nothing for over two years while they rotted in Chinese prison. More than that, he and Pompeo slow-walked the extradition process, waiting till the last day for filings in the Meng case while she stayed in her mansion she owns in Vancouver.
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