On October 19, 2001, Almrei was brought to his lawyer's office for a CSIS interview; where he again reiterated his travels and denied having ever been to Sudan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Dagestan or Chechnya. He was also confronted with the fact that photographs of Ibn Khattab, Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta were found on his computer, though he protested that agents were taking them out of context and had simply been photos from news agencies such as BBC which were included in online stories he had read, and were saved in his web cache. He was arrested on a security certificate nevertheless, and the following month judge Danièle Tremblay-Lamer found the certificate "reasonable". On November 10, 2002 he retracted part of his statement and said that he had worked as an Imam in Afghanistan but worried that in the wake of the terrorist attacks the truth would be incriminating. He also said that he had been tasked to run a girls' school in Tajikistan by Al Haramin.