A Sri Lankan family that sheltered the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden after he fled to Hong Kong in 2013 has been given asylum in Canada, an aid group supporting the family said.
Supun Thilina Kellapatha and Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis landed in Toronto on Tuesday with their children, Sethumdi and Dinath. They planned to travel on to Montreal and settle there as permanent residents.“This is the best news I’ve heard in a long, long time,” Mr. Snowden tweeted.
The move ends a long period of uncertainty for the family, who had sought asylum in Hong Kong but were denied it in 2017. Mr. Kellapatha had said he was tortured in Sri Lanka.
“After over a decade in limbo, they can now begin to build new lives in Canada, reunited with the rest of their family and free of the constant fear and worry that marked their existence as high-profile asylum seekers in Hong Kong,” Marc-André Séguin, the president of the aid group For the Refugees, said in a statement Mr. Kellapatha and Ms. Nonis had put up Mr. Snowden for about three days in their 250-square-foot apartment in Hong Kong in 2013, just after the contractor had become the focus of intense global attention for his revelations about secret United States surveillance programs.
“He said, ‘You are a good man,’” when he arrived, Mr. Kellapatha recalled in 2016. “But I feel he is better than me because he respected me.”
Mr. Kellapatha said he did not worry about hosting Mr. Snowden and believed it was the former contractor who was most at risk. The family later used $200 that Mr. Snowden left for them under a pillow to buy food and clothing for their daughter, Sethumdi.The stay was arranged by a lawyer, Robert Tibbo, under the belief that cramped refugee apartments in poor Hong Kong neighborhoods were the last place anyone would look for one of the world’s most wanted men. That assumption proved correct. Mr. Snowden, after a brief stay at the luxury Mira Hotel, vanished from public view as he moved from one refugee apartment to another. NYT
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