Police handled Hill shooter correctly, report concludes

• The most outrageous unreported detail of the Oct. 22 attack on Parliament Hill happened seconds into gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s six-minute rampage.

It was 9:50 a.m., and the angry religious fanatic had just fired the first shot from his Winchester rifle into the back of National War Memorial sentry Cpl. Nathan Cirillo.

Cirillo fell to his hands and knees and started crawling east along the front of the memorial. Zehaf-Bibeau, showing no emotion, fired a second round into the soldier’s lower back. Just past the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Cirillo collapsed onto his stomach. The killer moved closer to the fallen man and took aim. A third and final shot rang out, again in the back.

Graphic details of the ter- ror and trauma of last Oct. 22 are laid out in an exhaustively detailed Ontario Provincial Police report into the events surrounding Zehaf-Bibeau’s attack and death. A second OPP report critiques the RCMP security posture on the Hill that day. Both were obtained by the Ottawa Citizen, along with an internal RCMP “after-action” report.

With Cirillo down, ZehafBibeau started moving north toward the Hill. Three rounds remained in his gun and five in his pocket. At 9:55:45, at the north end of the Centre Block’s Hall of Honour, Zehaf-Bibeau was dead, felled by 31 bullets shot by RCMP and Commons security staff.

At an unusual joint news conference Wednesday, the RCMP, House of Commons and Senate will release redacted versions of the three reports into his attack and death, plus the separate OPP report on the actions of Commons and Senate security staff that day. Three findings stand out: ❚The RCMP and parliamentary security officers who confronted Zehaf-Bibeau in Centre Block appear to have shown tremendous courage.

It’s been widely reported how Commons guard Samearn Son was shot in the leg trying to disarm the gunman when he stormed through the main Centre Block doors. But six Mounties stepped up, too.

Four formed an IARD team (Incident Active Response Deployment), intended to immediately engage an active shooter rather then waiting for a tactical team to arrive. At one point, Zehaf-Bibeau emerged from behind a pillar near the library and fired a round directly at them. Two others joined in the final battle, along with the House of Commons sergeant-at-arms at the time, Kevin Vickers. Their names are redacted from the report.

The OPP report exonerates all the officers. “They were justified to resort to lethal force to preserve themselves and those around them.” That includes the prime minister and dozens of MPs and senators in meeting rooms just metres away.

The fatal police shot was either one to the back of his neck that perforated his brain or another that pierced his heart. The National Post reported Tuesday that RCMP Const. Curtis Barrett, working in tandem with Vickers, fired the fatal shot. ❚ Zehaf-Bibeau appears to have done some very preliminary planning, but he was what criminal profilers call an “unorganized” villain. He made most of it up as he went along and was armed with a lever-action, single-shot .30-30 rifle. ❚ The OPP report into the RCMP’s security posture on the Hill that day is depressingly familiar: Four separate security forces — the RCMP, House and Senate security and Ottawa police —were each responsible for different aspects of Hill security at that time. ❚With the exception of the RCMP-Ottawa Police working relationship, the Oct. 22 response was “limited” by deficiencies in training, pre-incident planning, outdated equipment, communications problems and federal budget cuts to the RCMP.