Peter Pal Jola's daughter said he left Kitchener, Ont., for Ethiopia in March for a short trip to hand out supplies.
Instead, the 67-year-old Canadian citizen never left the airport.
“He wasn’t planning to go for long,” said Nyarieni Pal in an interview with CBC News. “He was just going to go visit friends and family.”
Pal said her father planned to deliver some supplies to people in his hometown in South Sudan, where ongoing conflict and hunger have ravaged the population. Some of those supplies consisted of a few pairs of walkie-talkies that Jola bought online from Amazon, she said.
But possessing those devices, which are restricted in Ethiopia, resulted in Jola being charged with three counts of importation of military equipment, Pal said.
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