Sometimes when Mohamed Fadil is at the mosque or having a meal with friends, he hears mention of his former boss, the late patriarch of the Khadr family, Ahmed Saeed Khadr. They’ll say he gave up his life in Canada to help the needy in Afghanistan. “They say, ‘He’s a great man who left a legacy behind,’ ” Mr. Fadil said. “They don’t know what he did.”

But Mr. Fadil said he knows.

Until now, Mr. Fadil has kept quiet about what he saw when he worked alongside Mr. Khadr in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1980s. They crossed paths again in the late 1990s until Mr. Khadr fled Kabul following the 9/11 attacks.

But he said he decided to break his silence to set the record straight about the “breach of trust” he claims Mr. Khadr committed by using charities as a cover while he waged and facilitated violence.

While the Khadr family name is now widely associated with Omar Khadr, Mr. Fadil’s account bolsters the case that the young Canadian at Guantanamo Bay is to some extent paying for the sins of his father.

Among Mr. Fadil’s claims:

Human Concern International confirmed that Mr. Fadil worked for the charity in the 1980s alongside Mr. Khadr. But HCI said it had no knowledge of what it called Mr. Fadil’s unproven allegations.

The group’s lawyer, Colonel Michel Drapeau, said HCI dismissed Mr. Khadr in 1995 and conducted an audit that found no evidence any funds or equipment had been misappropriated. None of the HCI executives or directors from that time remains active, he added. Many of the events described by Mr. Fadil occurred after Mr. Khadr left HCI.

“Khadr is not a saint,” said Mr. Fadil, a 54-year-old Iraqi-Canadian businessman and longtime chairman of the Canadian Relief Foundation, a registered charity. “Khadr was really a jihadi. Khadr was not a charity worker.”

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An ethnic Kurd from northwest Iraq, Mr. Fadil settled in Ottawa in 1980. He was a graduate engineering student at the University of Ottawa when he first met Mr. Khadr.

It was 1985.

The Soviet Red Army was in Afghanistan fighting bands of U.S.-backed mujahedin. Millions of refugees were streaming through mountain passes to northwest Pakistan.

“I used to see on TV documentaries about the mujahedin and how the Soviets were destroying Afghanistan and burning the villages, killing the innocent people,” Mr. Fadil said. “It’s a duty on the Muslims to help each other, it’s part of our religion. I approached somebody in the mosque, because he was doing fundraising. And they said they want somebody to run their office.”

The charity was called Human Concern Relief Fund Society and the position was at its northwest Pakistan office, which at that time was run by Ahmed Khadr.

When Mr. Fadil landed in Pakistan, Mr. Khadr picked him up at the Peshawar airport and took him to a guest house that was full of Arab fighters. Mr. Khadr had surrounded himself with Egyptian and Algerian armed militants, he said.

The charity was Canadian but Mr. Fadil said most of the funding, up to $3-million a month, came from a Kuwaiti group called Lajnat al-Dawa. Mr. Khadr was director and Mr. Fadil was the deputy director, projects.

Mr. Fadil recalled a meeting with Mr. Khadr where he met a thin, bearded Kuwaiti named Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, whose job was to deliver money from Gulf donors to Sayyaf, one of the seven mujahedin commanders.

“Khadr was a very aggressive man, did not trust anybody and wanted to do everything himself,” Mr. Fadil said. Mr. Khadr was let go in 1986, he said, because the Kuwaitis felt he was neglecting his duties.

“They didn’t want him, they were not happy with him,” he said. “He was spending a lot of time outside the office with mujahedin and Arab fighters instead of concentrating on the work of the charity.”

Mr. Khadr next moved onto what was called the “Challenge Project.” Its objective was to remove Western influences from Afghanistan by replacing international aid programs with ones financed and run by Muslims.

He also spent time fighting. Mr. Fadil said he was visiting bin Laden’s al-Masada complex in Afghanistan when he saw Mr. Khadr on the frontlines battling the Soviets alongside Mohamed Atef, bin Laden’s military chief.

Mr. Fadil acknowledged he also took up arms against the Soviets during that period, but said he only did it twice and on his own time while for Mr. Khadr the jihad was a “full-time” preoccupation.

He said Mr. Khadr had even tried to create a computer program that would track resistance fighters in Afghanistan. Financiers poured US$250,000 into the project, he said, but it flopped after mujahedin leaders objected, fearing information about their forces could fall into the wrong hands.

Meanwhile, Mr. Khadr got into a power struggle over the Challenge Project. Abdullah Azzam, the popular Islamic scholar who was once bin Laden’s mentor and was instrumental in recruiting Arabs to fight in Afghanistan, wanted control of it but Mr. Khadr resisted.

Mr. Khadr asked Mr. Fadil to support him in the dispute but he declined. Later, Mr. Fadil was in Afghanistan inspecting an aid project when he arrested by a militant group and held in a compound by armed guards.

He said the guards eventually let on that Mr. Khadr had given them instructions to make sure that Mr. Fadil “should not come back.” But the militants had second thoughts and released him after two weeks.

In 1988, Mr. Khadr rejoined the Canadian charity, which had changed its name to Human Concern International. But the dispute with Azzam continued. At one point, Azzam raided Mr. Khadr’s office and emptied it, Mr. Fadil said. The matter was sent to a panel of arbitrators who held court at bin Laden’s compound in Peshawar.

But Mr. Khadr never got over it, Mr. Fadil said. He distributed pamphlets calling Azzam a CIA spy, he said. “Khadr came to a meeting and I was there with a few Arabs. He said, ‘This guy should be eliminated and his blood is halal [legal]. And he’s kafir [an unbeliever],’ ” Mr. Fadil said.

“In Islam, and in the area of jihad, especially in Kabul in that time, if I say, ‘He’s a kafir,’ it means you have to be killed. It’s a very big word,” he said. “So when the word comes in a jihadi group, it means that person should be eliminated. So Khadr really sanctioned, initiated, the process.”

On Nov. 24, 1989, Azzam was killed by a bomb planted in his car. The killers were never caught but they are suspected to have been Egyptian militants close to bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri. Mr. Fadil believes Mr. Khadr is partly to blame.

Following the killing, Mr. Fadil finished his aid projects and left HCI. But he said he continued to hear about Mr. Khadr’s activities from friends close to the Canadian.

He said they told him, for example, that during the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet pullout, Mr. Khadr fought under Gulbiddin Hekmatyar, whose forces flattened much of Kabul.

He said he was also told by Pakistani ISI military intelligence officers, as well as Arabs and Afghans, that vehicles used in the 1995 truck bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, which left 17 dead, had been linked to Mr. Khadr.

“It’s obvious that Khadr knew, at some stages knew,” Mr. Fadil said. “Maybe he did not plan it, but he would have known, really. He would have known that this thing would happen.”

Following the bombing, Mr. Khadr was arrested but released after then prime minister Jean Chrétien raised his detention with then prime minister Benazir Bhutto. HCI promptly dismissed Mr. Khadr and he started his own non-profit group.

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After bumping around disaster zones such as the Balkans, Mr. Fadil returned to Pakistan in 1999 with his charity, the Canadian Relief Foundation, which was working with the UN’s World Food Program.

Afghanistan had changed.

The Taliban had taken over and bin Laden was running terrorist training camps. A new ideology had taken root among Arabs in the region, one that sanctioned the killing of Western civilians. Arabs were being told to go to the West and form sleeper cells.

Among those Mr. Fadil met upon his return was a young Canadian pilot from Toronto named Amer El-Maati. He drove a Toyota Corolla with the roof sliced off. Mr. Fadil said he had removed it so he could mount a machine gun in the back.

Mr. Fadil said Mr. El-Maati used to transport people to the frontlines where the Taliban was fighting the Northern Alliance. (After 9/11, the FBI posted a $5-million reward for Mr. El-Maati, saying he was sought “in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States.”)

Mr. Khadr was living in Kabul.

“All the Arabs, they knew Khadr was one of the close advisors to Zawahiri. He was. And Khadr was very close to bin Laden. And they really listened to Khadr because Khadr had access to international people,” Mr. Fadil said.

“And Khadr was always visited in his house in Peshawar after al-Qaeda was established and in Kabul during Taliban. Every time when there was a [al-Qaeda] delegation coming from Kandahar to Kabul, Khadr knew and they were in his house meeting.”

Mr. Khadr employed two notorious Egyptian terrorists, Sheikh Issa and Abu Khabab, a bomb expert who experimented with chemical weapons and ran the Darunta training camp, he said.

“Did you know Khadr was paying a salary to both?” Mr. Fadil said. “I saw a school in Kabul in a compound behind a building. It was children, teaching them Islam and they were both employed there. They were getting salaries.”

Mr. Fadil said Mr. Khadr asked him to fund an orphanage but he balked after finding out Sheikh Issa worked there. “So I refused and then Khadr looked at my face, put his finger in my face and he said, ‘Do you know who I am? I can get rid of anybody in Afghanistan, any minute, any time I want,’ ” Mr. Fadil said.

Days later, Mr. Fadil said he was leaving his office when a four-wheel drive with Arabs inside tried to run him down. He jumped over a wall and the men pursued him but fled after Mr. Fadil’s security guards arrived.

Soon after that, he said a group of armed Arabs came to his charity office at night, overpowered his guards and began searching for him. He was staying elsewhere. “They looked for me in all the rooms and they left,” he said.

In a last attempt, Mr. Khadr told the Taliban that Mr. Fadil was a spy. Mr. Fadil said he was summoned by the Taliban intelligence chief in Kabul. He was holding a file Mr. Khadr had given him.

“In the file, Khadr has written information that I am a danger for Taliban, I have links with UN, with international governments, and all the aid workers are spies, including me. But I am more dangerous than them because I am a Muslim and I should be captured, put on trial.”

Mr. Khadr wanted the Taliban to execute him, he said. The Taliban refused but Mr. Fadil wondered, why is Mr. Khadr, a supposed Canadian aid worker, giving the Taliban dossiers on supposed Western spies?

According to the Khadr family, when Mr. Fadil returned to Afghanistan, Mr. Khadr helped him get re-established. In exchange, he asked Mr. Fadil to employ his son, Abdurahman Khadr.

“Abdurahman worked for Fadil for three months, translating paperwork,” said Joshua Boyle, who first met Mr. Khadr’s daughter Zaynab in 2008 and is now her husband.

“During that time, Fadil greedily invited every warlord and power broker in the region to visit his offices. This attracted the attention of the CIA, and when Abdurahman began co-operating with the CIA following 9/11, they questioned him extensively about Fadil’s actions and friends.

“In Abdurahman’s own words, ‘very shady people, even people my father would not deal with’ were linked to Fadil. CSIS and the CIA took a strong interest in him.

“Fadil viewed Abdurahman’s co-operation with Western governments as a betrayal. It is the family’s opinion that Fadil is upset that the Khadrs were honest with the CIA and CSIS about Fadil’s own actions in the region in 2001, and he is now trying desperately to distract attention from an ongoing investigation of himself by spreading false rumors and innuendo about their deceased father.”

Mr. Fadil responded that he had no way of knowing the Khadrs had discussed him with intelligence services. But he said he had done no wrong and authorities apparently agree because he is a free man.

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When he heard about the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Fadil was floored to find out he and Mr. Khadr’s former colleague Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was considered the mastermind of the operation. “It’s one of the shocks of my life that Khalid Sheikh was with us in the office and such a nice guy, and he did all that.”

After the Taliban crumbled, Mr. Khadr fled to Pakistan. He hid in the lawless tribal belt until 2003, when Pakistani troops came to arrest him. A gun battle erupted and when it was over, Mr. Khadr was dead.

With his charity CRF, Mr. Fadil moved on to Iraq and, when the tsunami struck Southeast Asia, to Indonesia. He returned to Canada last year and now runs a Dubai-based medical equipment company, but it bothers him when he meets Canadians who still hold Mr. Khadr in high regard.

He blames Mr. Khadr and his al-Qaeda associates for the tragedy that has befallen Afghanistan. He said they abused the hospitality of the Taliban to settle scores with the West.

“All the sufferings would not have happened if al-Qaeda would not have betrayed their host in the first place by using Afghanistan as a base to attack the U.S.,” he said. “No young Muslim in Canada should be fooled by Khadr and his friends’ legacy.”

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