Parents of mosque killer are victims, too: judge
Nothing to back up assertion father partly responsible for killings: judge
QUEBEC Alexandre Bissonnette has shown little emotion over almost six days of his sentencing hearing.
He didn’t flinch when security camera footage of him killing people at point-blank range was screened in the courtroom. He didn’t react to heart-wrenching testimony by nine victims of his rampage, including a man left paralyzed, women whose husbands he murdered and children he left fatherless.
It took a mention of Bissonnette’s parents and their suffering on Wednesday for the killer to crack, leaving him sobbing in the glass-encased prisoner’s dock.
The moment came during the testimony of Ibrahim Bekkari Sbai, who was in a Quebec City mosque on Jan. 29, 2017, when Bissonnette killed six men there. Visibly angry, Sbai, who was not injured in the shooting, repeatedly turned and pointed at Bissonnette as he spoke, at one point calling the confessed murderer an imbecile.
Justice François Huot interrupted Sbai and asked him to be respectful toward Bissonnette, who has pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six of attempted murder.
Later during his testimony, Sbai referred to a message exchanged between Bissonnette and his father, Raymond Bissonnette, the contents of which cannot be reported because they are under a publication ban.
Sbai implied Bissonnette’s father was partly responsible for the massacre, saying he “contributed to the education of a monster.”
Huot interjected and spent several minutes explaining that based on the evidence before him, there is nothing to back up Sbai’s assertion. Huot said he understands that instinctively, people look for someone to blame after an event like the shooting.
“I understand your trauma and your anger, but I think that we will all gain as a society to take a step back,” Huot said. “Alexandre Bissonnette was a 27-year-old man. He wasn’t a young child.”
Huot said that Bissonnette’s parents are, in his view, “collateral victims and I’m convinced they are suffering immensely,” Huot said.
In the prisoner’s box, Bissonnette was sobbing.
Sbai turned to the gallery and apologized to Bissonnette’s father, who was sitting in the third row following the exchange without showing any emotion.
Huot suspended the hearing for five minutes to allow the killer to compose himself.
The judge will have to decide Bissonnette’s prison sentence. The maximum punishment he could impose is life in prison without the possibility of parole for 150 years.
Since Monday afternoon, the prosecution has been calling to testify people directly affected by the shooting, including those who were injured or escaped unharmed and relatives of those who died. Huot has asked most of them for input on the sentence.
On Wednesday morning, the daughter of one of the men killed said more than a year later, she still can’t make sense of the attack.
“How could a man, who is the same age as me, who grew up in the same city as me, who had similar schooling to me, someone I could have known, who probably hung out in the same places as me, how could this person have taken the life of my father and five other fathers, destroying the peaceful lives of so many people?” Megda Belkacemi said to Huot.
Belkacemi, 29, is the eldest of the 17 children who lost their fathers in the shooting. She was the first of the victims’ children to speak at the sentencing hearing.
Her father, Khaled Belkacemi, 60, was a food sciences professor at Université Laval in Quebec City.
Belkacemi said her life was turned upside down after the shooting. Her father’s death wasn’t confirmed for nearly 24 hours, a period where her hope that he had survived slowly evaporated.
“My world crumbled,” said Belkacemi, a lawyer. “The rest of that week was a complete nightmare.”
She told Huot the reality that her father had been killed hit her a few days later when she saw his body lying in a casket at a funeral home in Montreal. Where his left eye had been was a hole, left by the bullet that had struck his head.
“Until then I still had the absurd hope that there was just a simple administrative error, that there was a mistake about who it was,” she said. “But no, it was, in fact, my father and he had died.”
Belkacemi said her father was a professor at a university in Algiers where the rector was killed by terrorists. On the day of the assassination, her father had a meeting with the rector and realized he could have been killed. After that, her parents quit their jobs and fled to Canada.
Ironically, she said, the calm and serene life they found in Quebec City was upended by gunfire.
“The violence that my parents fled caught up to us,” she said.
Asked by Huot for her thoughts on Bissonnette’s sentence, Belkacemi said she has a “deep fear for my security, the security of my family, my future children and of all society” knowing Bissonnette could one day be released.
Belkacemi’s brother, Amir, 26, was called to testify next.
He described Bissonnette as someone who has “destroyed what was inside him, he destroyed his own humanity.”
Standing in the witness box with his back turned to Bissonnette, he added: “I am certain this man behind me is a monster. And I feel strongly that monsters don’t have a place amongst us.”
Belkacemi’s wife, Safia Hamoudi, who is a professor in the department where her husband worked, also testified. Since her husband’s death, “my life does not make sense anymore,” she said. “I lost all the joy in my life.”
Hamoudi described her husband as a “warm, caring and peaceful man. I have a hard time accepting that he was killed with a firearm.”
Another witness, a man who was at the mosque with his young son the night of the shooting, dismissed Bissonnette’s contention that he did not want to harm children.
In his police interrogation, a video of which was shown in court last week, Bissonnette said he had not targeted children.
The man, who cannot be identified because of a publication ban, said Bissonnette fired toward him, his son and two other children.
“If he was really watching out for children, he wouldn’t have been shooting in our direction,” the man said.
As the attack unfolded, the man said, he instinctively felt like going toward Bissonnette to try to stop him but held back because his son pulled on his sleeve.
After they escaped through an emergency exit, “my son was trembling. He was so traumatized. I kept telling him he’s my hero because he saved my life.”
The boy didn’t know what had happened to the two other children.
“I hope my friends aren’t dead,” he told his father.
I am certain this man behind me is a monster. And I feel strongly that monsters don’t have a place amongst us.