Man who sent bomb threats to Concordia gets 18 months
Hisham Saadi, who sent fake bomb threats that caused Concordia University to evacuate three of its buildings last year, was sentenced Friday to a prison term of 18 months.
Quebec Court Judge Mélanie Hébert said Saadi — a student at the time — was thinking only of himself and did not consider the consequences of his actions when he sent letters to security at Concordia University and several Montreal media outlets.
During a sentence hearing last month, Saadi admitted he sent the threats to avoid having to write a midterm exam.
Evacuations began around 11 a.m. on March 1, 2017. Students were allowed back seven hours later.
Saadi was simply “a student who wasn’t ready for an exam,” Hébert said. “Instead of facing it, he preferred to entertain the public’s fears and prejudices.”
Saadi’s prison term will be followed by three years of probation.
He was convicted this year of having committed acts that, considering the context, were susceptible to causing fear that terrorist acts were about to be committed.
“He blames others for what happened to him,” Hébert said, noting during his trial Saadi tried to blame the university, a professor and a doctor.
The judge said the chances of rehabilitation are low unless Saadi faces up to what he did.
“He used depression to justify his acts,” Hébert said.
Last month, prosecutor François Allard asked that Saadi be sentenced to a 30-month prison term.
Saadi’s lawyer, Caroline Braun, suggested the widespread media coverage Saadi’s arrest received — his mother learned of it from a report in Lebanon — should serve as enough to dissuade others. She recommended Saadi be sentenced to a term of house arrest.
However, Hébert said she could not agree media coverage should be a mitigating factor and said Saadi made a “planned and researched” effort to include the media in his plans to create fear.
Saadi sent emails claiming to be from a white supremacist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens of Canada that planted bombs inside two Concordia buildings. An organization with a similar name exists in the U.S.
The emails warned bombs would be detonated “once per day” until “Concordia University stops religious activities of all kinds on campus.”
The threats prompted the university to evacuate three buildings.
During his sentence hearing on Sept. 24, Saadi said he sent the emails in a panic after he was scheduled to write two midterm exams within three days. He said he was already on probation for having failed a course in an economics doctorate program.
After seeing his exams schedule, he said, he began to take three times the dosage of antipsychotics and antidepressants he had been prescribed.
He said he believed he aced the first exam, then plotted how to get out of the second.
He tried to get a note from a doctor, but was turned down — which caused him to fall deeper into depression and contemplate suicide, Saadi said.