Lawyers for former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr head to federal court on Wednesday in an attempt to convince a Toronto judge to allow him to expand his civil lawsuit against the Canadian government.

The proposed $20-million action foundered last December when Justice Richard Mosley ruled the amended lawsuit needed to be rewritten before it could proceed.

Khadr, 27, now wants to include a claim that Canada conspired with the United States for what he says was the abuse of his rights and torture.

The federal government argues the conspiracy claim should not be allowed to go ahead.

None of the allegations has been proven in court.

The U.S. government has denied torturing the Toronto-born Khadr, currently incarcerated in Alberta.

Meanwhile, the widow of a U.S. special forces soldier killed in Afghanistan and an American soldier blinded by a grenade are suing Khadr for almost $45 million (U.S.).

In the lawsuit filed last May in Utah, Tabitha Speer and Sgt. Layne Morris allege Khadr, then 15, was responsible for the death of Sgt. Christopher Speer and Morris’s injuries in July 2002.

The factual basis for the suit, according to their lawyer, is Khadr’s guilty plea to five war crimes before a U.S. military commission in Guantanamo Bay in October 2010 that saw him sentenced to a further eight years in prison.

The plea deal included a stipulation of facts in which Khadr admitted to murder and attempted murder in violation of the rule of war, and three other war crimes.

Khadr has since said he only pleaded guilty to get out of Guantanamo Bay and be returned to Canada.

In 2006, a U.S. civil court awarded Speer’s widow and Morris $102 million (U.S.) in a never-enforced judgment against Khadr’s late father’s estate.

At the time, Khadr’s lawyer, Dennis Edney, described that award as obtained by “fraudulent” means because no one could defend against it.

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