RC MP met suspect days ago
Intervened multiple times to try to halt radicalization
The RCMP said Tuesday it had been working with Martin Rouleau to help him overcome his extremist thinking and met with him just 11 days before he allegedly ran down two Canadian Forces members with his car in an apparent act of terrorism.
At a news conference in Montreal, the Mounties outlined their four months of dealings with the 25-year-old radicalized Muslim convert, who came to RCMP attention in June when he began posting messages on Facebook suggesting he wanted to fight in Syria.
Identified as a “high-risk traveller,” Mr. Rouleau was arrested and questioned at the airport in July as he was leaving for Turkey. The RCMP seized his passport, but there was not enough evidence to charge him and he was released, said Supt. Martine Fontaine.
But police met repeatedly with Mr. Rouleau, his family and the imam at the mosque he attended, trying to talk him down from his newfound obsession with Islamist extremism. “We wanted to avoid his turning to violence,” the superintendent said.
The last intervention occurred on Oct. 9. The meeting ended on a positive note, with Mr. Rouleau saying he wanted to change his ways, said Supt. Fontaine.
“We did not have any indication, none whatsoever, of his intention to commit a crime in Canada,” she said. “If we did, we would have arrested him.”
He was not monitored after that.
The RCMP’s account of its interactions with Mr. Rouleau came a day after he is believed to have taken a Nissan Altima to a strip mall in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., at about 9 a.m. and waited two hours before running down two Canadian Forces members. Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, 53, died of his injuries. The other victim is expected to survive.
“This was a despicable act of violence,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons on Tuesday after paying tribute to Warrant Officer Vincent as a 28-year veteran of “distinguished service throughout this country.”
Following the attack, Mr. Rouleau called 911 to claim responsibility.
A patrol officer who witnessed the events followed Mr. Rouleau, who flipped his car into a ditch. When he emerged from the vehicle with a knife, police shot him dead.
The attack came a month after Abu Muhammad Adnani, a spokesman for the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham, urged followers to kill Canadians, suggesting they single out a victim and “run him over with your car.”
Investigators are treating the incident as an act of terrorism and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney acknowledged as much, telling reporters in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu that “what took place is clearly linked to extremist ideology.”
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said that while the hit-and-run was a criminal act, “there are national security implications. There is reason to believe the event was the violent expression of an extremist ideology promoted by terrorist groups with global followings.”
Mr. Rouleau appeared to be acting on his own rather than as part of a terrorist group. But he was predictably declared a “martyr” by ISIS extremists. A Canadian member of ISIS who goes by Abu Khalid Al Kanadi urged others to “follow the footsteps of our brave brother Martin Rouleau who took revenge for Canadian military aggression in our lands.”
The owner of a pressure-washing company called J.M.T.R. Lavage a Pression Inc., Mr. Rouleau had converted and radicalized over the past 18 months. He was not secretive about his hardening beliefs. He began calling himself Ahmad, posted the logo of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham on his Twitter page and wrote on Facebook that “disbelievers” were destined for “the fire of hell.” It was a rapid descent. “He wasn’t speaking in the language of jihad until around April or May,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University’s Resilience Research Centre. “From his online profile, he seemed like a typical and fairly boring convert who was going through internal debates with Christian belief, with atheism, with secularism, and so on.”
Upon noticing the transformation, Mr. Rouleau’s family contacted the authorities for help, said Supt. Fontaine, who described them as co-operative. But even after arresting him at the airport and seizing his passport, police could not make a case against him.
The evidence was sent to Crown prosecutors, who decided there was not enough evidence to lay a charge of attempting to leave Canada to participate in terrorist activity, said Supt. Fontaine. He was therefore released and the investigation continued.
Having radical thoughts is “not a crime in Canada,” she said. And even if police had Mr. Rouleau under surveillance, it may not have been possible to stop the Quebec attack since all he was doing prior to hitting the soldiers was sitting in his car, she said.
Nothing in Mr. Rouleau’s behaviour suggested he was planning a terrorist attack, she added. In this case it was particularly tough to predict because his only weapons were a car and a kitchen knife. “It’s very difficult to know what an individual is going to do before a crime is committed,” the superintendent said.
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson said Mr. Rouleau was one of about 90 targets of national security investigations across Canada. The government recently acknowledged it had been revoking passports from extremists to prevent them from travelling to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS.
But testifying before the Senate Committee on National Security on Monday, Jeff Yaworsky, the CSIS deputy director of operations, said that, “for every extremist that we prevent from going overseas to engage in extremist activity, there’s one more individual that we have to investigate closely because they’re radicalized to the point where they want to leave.”
Ray Boisvert, a former CSIS counterterrorism chief, also said the consequence of the government’s success at stopping would-be terrorists from leaving the country was that they were confined to Canada, where they may attempt to strike from within.
“I think the problem right now is there’s just too many target sets,” he said. As a result, security officials are having to decide which ones to focus on. Stopping them from attacking is especially challenging when extremists act alone using simple weapons.
“He may have just decided that morning, this is it,” he said. “That’s the new reality, imagine a guy like that running into a mall.”