QUEBEC — It was only as he cowered inside a small prayer room, one arm around each of his young sons, that Farhat Guemri realized what he was hiding from.
Seconds before, as he knelt in prayer, a ‘pop’ had pierced through his mosque, sounding to him like firecrackers, or a rock pelting nearby windows.
Amidst the panicked crush that ensued inside his mosque’s large prayer room, he saw his boys, 10 and 12, running in the crowd. He ushered them away from a nearby exit and into a small imam’s room in the back of the mosque, believing it was safer.
As the trio crouched on the floor, taking refuge alongside seven or eight others, three men suddenly dropped to the ground immediately outside the small room. One man’s blood spattered Guemri’s sweater.
It was then that Guemri realized the danger was inside.
“I heard ‘tack tack tack tack tack,’ and all I could do was wait. Because we were there, there was nothing I could do… He was shooting at us.”
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On the night of Jan. 29, members of the Centre Culturel Islamique Québec gathered inside Quebec City’s largest mosque for the most important prayer of the day. For many, it was a Sunday ritual. For others, a time to recite the Koran in the basement. For two parents, it was a convenient spot to meet in the middle and pick-up their kids after a playdate.
On this night, two lifelong friends would wave a casual goodbye that would be their last, one life saved by leaving right after prayers, the other lost for staying a few minutes longer.
Another man’s choice to return for one more prayer — taking his boots off the rack to leave, then placing them back down and re-entering the room — likely cost him his life.
There was no denying that simmering anti-Muslim sentiment, across the United States and in Quebec, was sowing fear. Just one week before, this mosque had posted on its community board a floor plan showing upcoming renovations intended to increase security.
Still, they had prayed facing Mecca, their backs to the main entrance.
The bullets unleashed just after 7:50 p.m. would kill six men and injure more, shatter some Muslims’ sense of security, and call into question presumed tolerance within Quebec and Canada.
“There was a world before January 29,” said Ramzi Khemiri, a former mosque administrator, “and there is a world after.”
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Originally based at Université Laval in the early 1980s, the mosque’s current location, in the suburb of Ste-Foy, used to be a bank. Over the years, the community paid for it to be renovated; the spacious central prayer room, with forest green carpet, was the heart of the mosque.
On Sunday, prayers began there at 7:30 and lasted between 10 and 15 minutes. When they were over, about 45 adults and four children knelt or stood in the central area, some leaving, some lingering, and a few praying individually.
On his way out, Ali H. — he asked that his full name not be used — spotted Abdelkrim Hassane, 41, praying across the room. His close friend of 23 years and a work colleague, Ali knew he would see Hassane tomorrow at the office, where Hassane worked as a computer programmer.
Ali waved goodbye without stopping to chat, not wanting to keep his ride waiting outside.
Also in the prayer room was Aboubaker Thabti, a 44-year-old father of two. While working to obtain his equivalency requirements, the Tunisian-trained pharmacy technician worked a factory night shift; weekend evenings were the sole times he could come to night prayers at the mosque.
According to his close friend Anis Hammami, a mutual acquaintance had seen Thabti begin to walk out of the mosque, then change his mind.
“He got up to leave, got his boots, but then he said, ‘no I’d like to do one more supplementary prayer,’” Hammami said. “And that’s when it happened.”
The first sign of danger was a loud pop. Witnesses said the gunman initially fired outside the mosque before entering through the main door, the men’s entrance.
Standing nearby were close friends Ibrahima Barry, 39, and Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42. Both natives of Guinea, the men lived just one floor apart in a nearby apartment building. Between them they had six children — Mamadou two kids under three, Ibrahima four under 13.
Encountering the gunman as he entered, the men became the first two victims. They died together.
As the shots rang out, those inside and near the prayer room scattered, some running the length of the mosque and out the women’s exit, others fleeing downstairs or into the imam’s room.
Within seconds, the gunman fired more shots, walking into the mosque, though never straying much further than a few metres from the men’s entrance.
Those who were on this side of the room were most vulnerable. Thabti, the man who’d come back for another prayer, was fatally shot near an archway near the back of the mosque. Another man nearby was shot four times in the torso and once in the neck. He survived but is in critical condition.
At some points, the shooting briefly stopped as the gunman reloaded his weapon. Positioned behind a pillar near the shooter, beloved local butcher Azzedine Soufiane apparently realized there was an opportunity to intervene.
He stepped out and attempted to stop the shooter as he reloaded a second time.
“The brother was courageous,” Khemiri said. “He got close, and then he shot him three times.”
The father of three was killed, but his actions bought precious seconds for others inside the room to get away.
“Without this intervention we would have more deaths,” said Mohamed Labidi, vice-president of the mosque.
Downstairs, about 20 people who had been reciting the Koran were panicking, hearing the shots but not knowing if they should run. Some called 911, said Mokhles Yousfi, whose brother-in-law was downstairs.
Upstairs, crouched with his boys inside the imam’s prayer room, Guemri heard gunfire on and off.
“I thought the shooting was done, then it would restart — tack tack tack. I was concentrating on my children, I was calming them, saying ‘it’s going to be OK, don’t be scared, the police will be here soon.’ I wasn’t in shock, but in control, because I didn’t want my children to cry or lose control,” Guemri said.
By the time the final shots had been fired, three people lay in the vicinity of the imam’s room, among them Khaled Belkacemi, a Université Laval professor. Guemri could see that he was not moving.
Witnesses say the shooter left through the men’s entrance, leaving a rifle in the snow and fleeing in a car parked nearby.
Guemri estimates that police arrived about 10 minutes after the shooting began. At first, he didn’t understand the gunman had left. When a loud voice instructed him to raise his hands and come out of the room, he was afraid he would die.
“I saw that (the officer) was close and I thought it was the shooter, because I didn’t hear (them yell) ‘Police,’ I looked at him and he looked at me, and I thought he was going to shoot me.”
As paramedics arrived on scene, tending to the injured, police instructed anyone who wasn’t hurt to raise their hands in the air. They were then lined up along the back wall of the mosque and searched.
Outside the prayer room, Guemri surveyed the devastation. Men lay on the ground, bleeding. A voice called out, “please, ambulance, ambulance.” Near the centre of the room, a little girl sat unharmed, staring at her father who was hurt: “She was in shock, she wasn’t saying anything.”
As police walked him and his sons towards the exit, Guemri urged his children not to look, “but I couldn’t prevent it.”
As they left, Guemri looked back at Belkacemi, the professor who’d been shot outside the prayer room. “I heard someone say, ‘there’s nothing we can do for him.’”
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The barrage of 911 calls began at 7:55 p.m, all urgent requests for police and ambulances. Except one.
According to Sureté du Québec, 30 minutes after the shooting a 911 operator got a call from a man claiming responsibility for the shooting. Soon after, police arrested the man on the side of the road, near the bridge to Ile d’Orleans, five kilometres from the crime scene.
“He was armed and he spoke to us about his acts,” said Quebec City police inspector Denis Turcotte, in a press conference hours after the shooting.
According to Quebec news channel TVA, the 911 caller had not actually told the operator his whereabouts. Rather, police had used GPS to track the location of his cellphone.
Taken into custody was Alexandre Bissonnette, a 27-year-old Université Laval student from Quebec City. In a court appearance Monday, the diminutive man appeared on six counts of first degree murder, and five of attempted murder. He never looked up.
Descriptions from friends, classmates and neighbours paint a picture of a quiet, antisocial man who as a child had few friends and was rarely separated from his twin brother. He had been bullied, but he bullied back, former classmates said.
Recent online activity shows he was a Facebook fan of far-right politicians, including France’s Marine Le Pen. On a now-deactivated Twitter account belonging to an “Alex Bissonnette,” with a profile photo of the accused, he described himself as a “big” Donald Trump fan, saying last year that it was “time for a real leader who will fight against terrorism.”
Already in custody when Bissonnette was arrested was Mohamed Belkhadir, a 29-year-old engineering student, also at Université Laval. Just before the shooting, he had stepped out of the mosque to clear snow off the steps. He was at the side of the building when he heard an explosion of gunfire.
Belkhadir saw people fleeing from the mosque, but his reflex was to stay and help. He called 911 then tried to offer assistance to a friend who had been injured. It was then that he saw someone with a weapon approaching.
“I thought it was a shooter… I was scared and that’s why I ran away, but when I heard the orders to drop to the ground I understood that it was the police,” he said.
Belkhadir’s attempt to flee, and his misfortune to have dropped to the ground, reportedly next to the shooter’s discarded rifle, led the police to wrongly conclude that he was one of two killers.
As news of the shooting was breaking on news outlets around the world, word of the massacre reached Premier Philippe Couillard in Saint-Felicien, a rural town about 300 kilometres north of the provincial capital, at 9 p.m. He immediately made arrangements to fly back to Quebec City.
Couillard began coordinating the provincial response with his cabinet over the phone. Around 10 p.m. the decision was made to put in place the counter-terrorism police management structure, a provincial protocol that brings the expertise and resources of Quebec’s three largest police forces—the RCMP, the SQ and the Montreal force—to bear on terrorism cases.
Once Couillard’s flight landed at the Quebec City airport, he was driven straight to the Minister of Public Security’s headquarters. There, he was debriefed by police investigators.
Just after midnight, while reporters were being summoned to a news conference at 1:30 a.m., Couillard’s office tweeted that the premier had ordered flags on government buildings to be lowered to half mast to commemorate a “terrorist attack.”
It was the first time the mosque shooting had been described as terrorism.
“They were killed because they were Muslim. It wasn’t a coincidence,” said the premier’s spokesperson, Harold Fortin. “For him it was obvious that it was a hate crime.”
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In the chaotic hours immediately after the shooting, family and friends who received frantic calls rushed to the mosque for information, only to find police tape blocking entry.
Amine Abderrezag had heard his friend Souffiane was among the victims and was desperate for information. With none available at the mosque, he and 12 others went to the nearby university hospital.
“We just didn’t know what to do. It was our first reflex,” Abderrezag said.
The six men who died were transported to the university hospital, the closest to the mosque.
Five of the most seriously injured went to Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus, the city’s trauma centre. At home in his pyjamas when he got the call to come in, Dr. Julien Clément said he knew only that there had been a shooting; He didn’t know how many victims there were.
“I took for granted that if my colleague was calling me, it must be serious.”
By 9 p.m., just 15 minutes after the call, Dr. Clément was at the hospital, part of a team that included six general surgeons, one anesthesiologist, two intensive care specialists and two emergency room doctors.
One victim had a gunshot wound to the abdomen that turned out to be less serious than anticipated. For two others, the bullets had gone through muscle, but not hit any organs. The other two were in serious, unstable condition.
“They were pretty much dying in front of us,” Dr. Clément said.
It was a rare scene in a city that receives, on average, 15 gunshot cases each year, most the result of hunting accidents or suicide attempts.
“It’s kind of a fog of war,” Dr. Clément said. “I wasn’t sure how many patients there were on the scene. I didn’t know if there was a second wave of patients coming. We heard rumours of this, but we weren’t sure.”
Few trauma surgeons would be as well prepared to deal with a mass casualty event as Dr. Clément, who also served as a Canadian Armed Forces surgeon and deployed three times to Afghanistan.
“It’s more about the number of injured that come in—I think that’s the main skill that is transferrable from that type of situation,” he said. “You can think about it, but it’s really hard to train … It’s never like the real thing.”
Horrified family members, friends and other members of the Muslim community also began arriving at the city’s hospitals in desperate efforts to locate those who couldn’t be found and weren’t responding to phone calls and text messages.
About 40 people were on hand at Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus.
“It wasn’t just the wives and close family. It was the whole community,” said Geneviève Dupuis, a hospital spokesperson. “They wanted information but they also wanted a few seconds to pray with the patient. At first it was overwhelming, but they remained respectful and polite.”
They were ushered into a meeting room to wait for updates. It took three hours—until 11 p.m.— before Dr. Clément could take a breath.
“They needed some more surgery, but we knew that they were survivors,” he said.
Inside Université Laval’s Quebec Heart and Lung Institute, there would be no good news for friends desperate for information on Hassane, the computer programmer who stayed to linger after prayers.
Initially, there had been hope he was alive. Someone had seen paramedics perform CPR on him.
According to Ali, Hassane’s friend of 23 years who’d left the mosque minutes before the shooting began, another member of the mosque, a mutual friend, had gone to the university hospital searching for Hassane.
Ali said that when the friend arrived, hospital staff couldn’t confirm Hassane was among the victims because they hadn’t identified one body.
Ultimately, Ali said, they let the friend in to see the body himself. It was Hassane. Though he had been shot, he had also suffered a heart attack. Ali rushed to the hospital.
“When I got there I said, ‘what do we do now? We have to inform his wife.’ She had been calling us, but we couldn’t respond. What were were going to tell her?”
Back at Hôpital de l’Enfant-Jésus Dr. Clément delivered the news to the community members waiting near the operating rooms.
“At one point past midnight I told them the best thing they could do was to go home because there was nothing else they could do,” he said.
By 2 a.m., Dr. Clément left the hospital. He tried to get some sleep. He couldn’t.
Days after the shooting, he remains angry at the shooter, and bewildered by the forces he sees at play in a changing world.
“Those guys who were on the table were just like me,” he said. “The same age, most likely two or three kids. The only thing is they are Muslim and got shot. That’s all.”
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Word of the deaths spread quickly — to families in Guinea, New York, Ohio and more.
On the Université Laval campus, doctorate student Herve Nlandu was eagerly seeking his advisor, Prof. Belkacemi. The two were to run an experiment together in the lab Monday morning.
When Belkacemi didn’t show, Nlandu worried.
“Then, I saw an email saying he was gone,” he said. “I thought, this is not possible.”
By midday, widely circulated erroneous reports there were two shooters were corrected by police. After spending the night in custody Belkhadir was released.
“They said: ‘Mohamed, you’re not a suspect. You’re a witness… I was so relieved! I had these horrible thoughts that I would no longer be able to work, no longer be able to go to university, no longer be able to do the things I dreamed of.”
As anger and sorrow mounted, and crowds gathered for memorials across Canada, the largest in Quebec City, members of the Muslim community crowded into the Annour Mosque, a short drive from the crime scene.
Barely 24 hours after the shooting, the group, shell-shocked and haggard, had come together to discuss the massacre and seek reassurance of their safety from police.
Among them was Lhoussine El Manoug, an immigrant from Morocco who just hours before had made a shocking realization he wanted to share with the group.
On Thursday, three days before the shooting, he’d spoken with Bissonnette outside the mosque, after the prayers of Isha. He’d been asking for money; El Manoug thought he’d wanted to know about Islam, and greeted him with a ‘Salam!’
“He said, ‘I love Allah.’I thought, okay, what is this all about? He said, ‘I’ve seen photos of him,’” El Manoug said.
“Then I understood that he was laughing.”
With files from Laura Beeston
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