Toronto, Sep 20 (IANS) An Indo-Canadian, who was barred from boarding a flight from Edmonton in Canada to California last week, says he was made to feel like a terrorist.

Ganesh Sharma, owner of a convenience store in the Glenora locality of Edmonton, Alberta, was planning to attend the funeral of a childhood friend in California when he was stopped from boarding an Alaska Airlines flight last Friday morning at the Edmonton International Airport.

"It hurt my feelings," he told the Edmonton Sun in an interview.

"I asked them, 'Do you think the airplane's not safe if I'm sitting on it? Do I look like a criminal?' They didn't tell me anything. That's not right."

Sharma, 46, told the newspaper that even before he could go through the screening checkpoint with his valid Canadian passport, an officer from the US Department of Homeland Security stopped him from going any further.

He was also not refunded the US$952 that he had spent on the ticket.

He said that he might have been singled out because of the colour of his skin.

When contacted, Kelly Klundt, an official with the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, DC, told the Sun that she is prohibited from discussing individual cases for privacy reasons.

"We deny entry to thousands of individuals," Klundt was quoted as saying adding the department deals with 1.2 million passengers a day. "We enforce hundreds of laws."

She said racial profiling isn't part of the department's security screening.

Sharma's lawyer Matthew Feehan, also a personal friend, said that his client was a good man and added that the authorities should have a legitimate reason for not allowing him on board the flight.