Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre members Boufeldja Benabdallah, left, and Mohamed Labidi speak at a news conference to react to Alexandre Bissonnette guilty plea for the 2017 mosque shooting, on March 28, 2018 at the hall of justice in Quebec City, Que.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
Survivors of the Quebec City mosque shooting and families of the victims are expected to fill the public seats in court on Friday for what could bring a measure of finality to a community still struggling to close the wounds of the 2017 massacre.
The sentencing of Alexandre Bissonnette by Quebec Superior Court Judge François Huot is being closely watched for its legal repercussions, since the 29-year-old faces the possibility of an unprecedented 150 years in jail without the chance of parole.
For relatives of the victims and Quebec City’s wider Muslim community, the sentence could also bring some closure to a courtroom drama that has been both painful and cathartic.
It has been two years since Mr. Bissonnette gunned down worshippers at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, and more than 10 months since he pleaded guilty to his crimes.
“When this legal saga finally ends, it will give families a bit of relief,” Mohamed Labidi, former president of the Islamic centre, said on Thursday.
During victim impact statements last year, some told Justice Huot they didn’t want to contemplate the idea of crossing the path of Mr. Bissonnette on the street one day.
Survivors and family members offered a heart-wrenching parade of pain and loss at the witness stand: men with lifetime wounds from Mr. Bissonnette’s bullets, women mourning their husbands, and children left fatherless – some stoic before Justice Huot, others sobbing.
Families are seeking the maximum penalty for Mr. Bissonnette, Mr. Labidi said. “They want an exemplary sentence so that no other criminal could think of perpetrating a massacre like this.”
The courts are required to take victims’ statements into account when an offender is sentenced.
Prosecutor Thomas Jacques called the mosque murders “despicable” and “repugnant” and called for putting Mr. Bissonnette behind bars for 150 years – 25 years for each of the six men murdered.
Mr. Bissonnette’s lawyer, Charles-Olivier Gosselin, called consecutive terms a “death sentence by incarceration” that would destroy Mr. Bissonnette’s chances of rehabilitation and deny him hope. He asked for parole eligibility after 25 years in jail.
Mr. Bissonnette’s guilty plea on six counts of first-degree murder spared families the ordeal of reliving the details of the attack on Jan. 29, 2017. Still, lawyers revisited the shooting during sentencing arguments, leaving emotions in the courtroom raw.
Security footage screened in court showed Mr. Bissonnette moving calmly through the mosque the night of the assault, reloading his weapon and shooting men who were already agonizing on the ground. Some worshippers who heroically tried to stop him were fired upon point blank.
Testimony revealed Mr. Bissonnette harboured anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views, feeding his obsessions about Islam, firearms and mass killers online.
The defence, for its part, portrayed Mr. Bissonnette as an anxious and depressed man who had been bullied since elementary school. The murderer himself pleaded for mercy in sentencing, asking for a chance to one day get out of prison: “I would like maybe to have a glimmer of hope at the end of the long, dark tunnel in which I lost myself on Jan. 29,” he said.
Several widows of the murdered men attended Mr. Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing, and they plan to return to court on Friday to hear the judge’s decision.
“The sentencing won’t give me my husband back,” said Louiza Mohamed-Saïd, the widow of Abdelkrim Hassane. “But being there is part of my therapy. I was with my husband for better and for worse, and that means being with him to the end.”
She is no closer to declaring her personal struggles over. “It’s never over. My life has changed completely and radically. It’s as if [the shooting] was yesterday,” she said on Thursday. She said she focuses on the couple’s three children.
Justice Huot is scheduled to begin delivering his sentence in the morning.