Decision to withhold video allays pain of Muslim community
QUEBEC A Muslim community leader has expressed relief that a judge refused a media request for permission to broadcast excerpts from security camera videos of the night of the Quebec City mosque massacre.
Judge François Huot announced his decision Wednesday, in a judgment that included descriptions of the recordings.
He is presiding over the trial of Alexandre Bissonnette, who walked into the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec on Jan. 29, 2017, and killed six Muslim men as evening prayers were ending. He pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder and six of attempted murder.
“The public doesn’t need to see the videos to have an idea of the magnitude of these crimes,” the judge said.
Huot ruled the media can report, either orally or in writing, on the contents of the videos when they are presented in court.
The videos, presented as evidence during Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing later on Wednesday, show the killer calmly carrying out the attack, shooting repeatedly and reloading four times. In three cases, he is shown returning to men he had shot to fire into their bodies again.
Boufeldja Benabdallah, president of the mosque where the shooting occurred, told reporters the families of the six men killed and five men injured by Bissonnette would never have been able to heal if the videos were made public.
“When the judge described what was on the videos second by second, it was like we were seeing it, and it was very hard,” Benabdallah said. “Imagine if it were the images. We are adults. Imagine if it were the children watching the images.”
He said the community also feared that extremists would use the videos to promote hate.
Benabdallah, who said he would not watch the videos in court, said he did not have a problem with reporters describing the recordings in detail.
“The impact of an image remains engraved in your head; written words you read and you forget them,” he said.
Standing next to him, Louiza Hassane, the widow of one of the victims — Abdelkrim Hassane — held back tears. “It’s a good start,” she said of the judge’s decision, before walking away.
A consortium of seven media outlets, including the Montreal Gazette, had requested permission to broadcast the videos.
At a hearing about the videos Tuesday, Jean-François Côté, a lawyer representing media outlets, told Huot that the public has a right to see at least some of the videos the judge will reflect on as he deliberates on Bissonnette’s sentence.
The media requested access to selected parts of the recordings that would not be shocking and that do not show “raw violence,” Côté said, adding “it was never the media’s intention to broadcast executions.”
The Crown argued the video footage should be covered by a publication ban.
One of the Crown’s witnesses, Cécile Rousseau, a psychiatrist and expert on radicalization, advised against making the videos public. She said releasing them could retraumatize witnesses and the general population, encourage copycat crimes and be used by extremists for propaganda purposes.
Charles-Olivier Gosselin, Bissonnette’s lawyer, also objected to the videos being released, saying they could aggrieve victims and psychologically harm Bissonnette’s family.