Hill hijacker won pardon, obtained 17 more guns legally
But fallout from 1989 event leads to end of pardon
Charles Yacoub hijacked a Greyhound bus in 1989, put a gun to the driver’s head, scared the life out of 10 passengers and brought downtown Ottawa to a standstill during a six-hour standoff on the lawn of Parliament Hill.
He helped rewrite the book on what a “security threat” really meant when Middle East grievances were violently transferred to a faraway, peaceful capital.
And what happened in 2008?
Yacoub was pardoned. And what happened in 2012? Yacoub had legally registered 17 weapons, including rifles and handguns, that he had stored in his lovely brick home and decor shop in Saint-Esprit, Que., a village about 50 kilometres north of Montreal.
It was the storage, in fact, that got him into trouble. An appeal court ruling in Quebec in October 2016 explained — or at least attempted to — how a convicted hijacker who once drew the attention of a SWAT team and RCMP snipers became an avid gun collector and a quiet member of a local gun club.
“I don’t have any comment,” he said Wednesday, when approached with the news that the Greyhound driver, Roger Bednarchuk, 84, died last week. His driving career ended that fateful April 7, 29 years ago.
“The only thing I would like to say to you is I would like to offer his family my deepest sympathy, to his wife and children. From my feeling, he was a very courageous man.”
A strange case from the beginning. Yacoub, now 62, is a Lebanese-born Christian who wanted to deliver a message to the mass media and Canadian public about the Syrian military intervention in Lebanon at the time. Instead, he was taken away in handcuffs.
Though he fired a shot or two on the Hill, no one was hurt and both he and the 10 passengers disembarked safely after six jittery hours under the Peace Tower.
Not only was Yacoub granted bail but, at trial, he was actually acquitted of the three most serious charges: hostage-taking, intimidating Parliament and aggravated assault, but was convicted of forcible confinement and use of a weapon in commandeering the bus.
Many scratched their heads at the verdict — “I don’t know what I was if not a hostage,” said one trapped passenger — while a handful of MPs expressed outrage. Yacoub’s “honourable intentions,” the defence argued, meant his mindset was not criminal and he was in no way a terrorist. Somehow, a jury bought it.
The acquittal on the more serious charges, of course, led to a lighter sentence of six years. According to a La Presse story in January, Yacoub served two years and was released for good behaviour. There was, apparently, a weapons prohibition imposed in 1990, but it expired about a decade later.
Once the pardon was granted in 2008, Yacoub, who came to Canada in the mid-1970s, effectively had no active criminal record related to the hijacking. The appeal court surmised this was why he was able to legally acquire restricted weapons, such as a .44 Magnum, a collection of Smith & Wesson models and military-style rifles.
“I am a collector. I have the right to own a few weapons for my own collection,” he said Wednesday. “I have all the permits for all my guns.”
Well, his notoriety followed him. In 2011, an anonymous tipster called the Sûreté du Québec to alert them to a gun club member with a hijacking past who had posted politically charged videos on the internet. (He fancied himself a member of the Lebanese Christian Liberation Front and investigators found posts that were strongly antiIslam.)
In April 2012, police found 17 weapons were registered under his name. A warrant was executed in May and Yacoub was charged with improper storage of six weapons. Some, according to La Presse, were tucked away in a clothes closet and a handgun was found in a buffet drawer in the dining room.
Yacoub pleaded guilty to the six charges and was hoping for a discharge. Instead, he discovered the plea meant his pardon would disappear, he would face a fine and a criminal conviction would reappear on his record.
He tried to withdraw the guilty plea, but an appeal court rejected his effort in late 2016.
He said Wednesday that a two-year probation period was imposed, ending in October 2018. La Presse reported the court also imposed a 10-year weapons prohibition, until 2026.
The weapons, he added, are gone.
Strange case. First the courts ruled he was not a hostage-taker, later the government said he wasn’t officially a criminal. Finally, he was nailed for messy kitkeeping. The wheels on the bus …