Quebec mosque shooter’s parents ‘suffering’

Security video shows Quebec mosque killer Alexandre Bissonnette buying a drink before the Jan. 29, 2017, shooting in which six men were killed. 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-yearold man. He wasn’t a young child.”

Huot said that Bissonnette’s parents, Manon Marchand and Raymond Bissonnette, are, in his view, collateral victims.

“I’m convinced they are suffering immensely,” Huot said.

Sbai turned to the gallery and apologized.

Bissonnette’s father sat in the third row of the gallery, following the proceedings and not showing any emotion.

Earlier Wednesday, the daughter of one of the men killed in the shooting said the killer has left her living in fear that she will also lose her mother and her brothers.

“Alexandre Bissonnette was so afraid that his family would be attacked. Finally, it was my family that was attacked,” Megda Belkacemi told Justice Francois 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 for Bissonnette, who last month pleaded guilty to killing six men and injuring five others at the mosque on Jan. 29, 2017.

During his police interrogation, a video of which was shown in court last week, Bissonnette said he went to the mosque and shot people because he was afraid that his family would be the victim of a terrorist attack. But in a meeting with a prison social worker in September, he said in fact he had been thinking of committing a mass murder since he was a teenager.

Belkacemi spoke from the witness stand, her back to an impassive Bissonnette, who sat in the prisoner’s box, his wrists shackled.

Khaled Belkacemi, 60, was a food sciences professor at Laval University 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, 29, 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 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. 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, their calm and serene lives were upended on Jan. 29, 2017.

“The violence that my parents fled caught us,” she said.

Belkacemi said she still has many questions about the shooting.

“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?” she said to Huot.

“I have a deep fear for my security, the security of my family, my future children and of all society knowing” that Bissonnette may one day be released, she told Huot.

She did not say how long she would like to see Bissonnette serve in prison, noting that she has full confidence in the justice system.

Her brother, Amir, 26, also addressed the court Wednesday.

“I am certain this man behind me is a monster,” he said. “And I feel strongly that monsters don’t have a place amongst us.”

The maximum sentence Bissonnette could face is 150 years — consecutive 25-year sentences for each of the six first-degree murder convictions. Bissonnette’s lawyer has said he will recommend a sentence of 25 years.