Toronto – After three long months spent trying to convince the world she belonged here, in Canada, Suaad Hagi Mohamud landed at Pearson airport yesterday and finally heard those two little words that mean the world.

“Welcome home.”

The long-awaited greeting, from one of the three Canada Border Services Agency officers who met Mohamud and ushered her through a priority immigration line, signalled the end of a nightmare that landed the Toronto woman in a Kenyan jail, kept her separated from her 12-year-old son here, and brought her perilously close to deportation to her native, lawless birthplace of Somalia.

The joyous words rang out again minutes later as Mohamud, 31, made her way to the luggage carousels,

where a score of baggage porters, recognizing her from recent media coverage, broke into a musical chant.

“Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!” chanted the porters, some of whom, like Mohamud, were born in Somalia.

And then, as Mohamud emerged from behind the security barriers, came the most welcoming moment of all – a long-anticipated embrace with her boy, Mohamed Hussein.

“I’m here for my son,” she said, trying to be heard over the din of the welcoming crowd. “It’s really something I missed,” she said of the boy she’d last seen in May, when she took two weeks emergency medical leave from her job to visit her sick mother in Nairobi.

Back then, Mohamed was just finishing Grade 6; now, after a summer spent mostly with babysitters and family friends and waiting for his mom to come home, he’s getting ready for Grade 7. But before that happens, mother and child plan to spend a few weeks making up for lost time, hanging out, going to movies, taking in a Blue Jays game.

“It’s been really hard on Mohamed,” said Asha Omar, a 21-year-old in the household of seven people who took the boy in during his mother’s absence.

“It’s been difficult every day,” she added, especially since Mohamed’s mother “has been emotional, frustrated, scared.

“I’ve known her five years – she is such a good human being,” Omar said.

“Not knowing whether she was going to jail, or be deported back to Somalia, it was terrible. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”

But Mohamud, in Amsterdam, knew exactly what was going to happen the moment she landed at Pearson

“He’s my son, but he’s also my friend,” Mohamud told a Star reporter at Schiphol airport as she waited for her connecting flight to Toronto. “Ooh! I can’t wait to see my baby! I’m just going to hug him so hard!”

And she made a vow.

“I will never travel without him again,” she said. And to make her point, she purchased a big hard-sided suitcase with wheels that Mohamed would use the next time they travel.

Hours later, the long flight to Toronto behind her, Mohamud wheeled the empty suitcase with her as she emerged into the arrivals hall and a crowd chanting “Welcome. Welcome.”

Wilma Cathcart, at the airport to pick up a friend arriving from Glasgow, recognized Mohamed from all the media coverage as he stood waiting for his mom, a bunch of red and yellow roses in his hands, and introduced herself.

“I am very ashamed of our government,” she said. “We just wanted to say we’re so happy to see that his mom is back.”

Others in the welcoming crowd agreed.

“We are not second-class citizens,” cried one man, waving Somali and Canadian flags.

“I’m glad I’m Canadian,” he added. “I love this country.”

Mohamud, who came to Canada in 1999 and later became a Canadian citizen, flew to Africa in May on her four-year-old Canadian passport to visit her mother and other family members in Kenya. But when she went to board her KLM flight home, a KLM employee at Nairobi airport decided she didn’t look like her passport photo and denied her boarding.

“I never thought it was going to happen right after I became a Canadian citizen and I found a new home,” Mohamud told the Star as she waited in Nairobi. “I really thought I (could) be far away from all this trouble. I really don’t know what to say.”

The Canadian High Commission in Nairobi decided she was an impostor – her lips were different from her passport photo, her glasses didn’t match – cancelled her Canadian passport, reported her to Kenyan authorities and put her out on the street.

She was promptly arrested by Kenyan authorities as a stateless person, jailed in a crowded, flea-infested prison, and threatened with deportation to her birthplace, Somalia.

Meanwhile, Canadian authorities ignored her. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan and Prime Minister Stephen Harper remained silent, even after Mohamud trotted out reams of other Ontario identification establishing – or so she thought – her Canadian citizenship.

But none of them were good enough, apparently, for Canadian officials.

Finally, after weeks of prodding by the Star, her lawyer, friends and family members, the Canadian government agreed to a DNA test, which established – with more than 99.99 per cent accuracy – the relationship between mother and son.

On Thursday, Harper said Canada’s “first priority” was to bring Mohamud home.

That was enough to spur Canadian officials in Kenya to issue her with emergency travel documents and book Mohamud a flight home.

And yesterday, after some 24 hours in airplanes and airports, Mohamud was home.

Walking out of the customs hall and toward the waiting crowds – and her son – at Pearson’s Terminal 3, Mohamud’s nerves, so strong and constant during all those months, finally caught up with her.

“Oh my God,” she said. “This looks scary. This looks scary.”

But the moment quickly passed and, as she emerged to the cries of “Welcome back!” Mohamud raised her fist in a gesture of tired acknowledgment.

Fighting her way to the curb and a ride home, her son clutched tightly at her side, Mohamud had one last thought for sharing.

“I’m really happy to come home,” she told reporters. “That’s all.”