Bennis Inquest Moves Forward
The coroner’s inquest into the shooting death of Mohamed Anas Bennis, who was killed by a Montreal police officer in 2005, will go forward after a delay of over two years.
The Quebec Coroner’s Office said that coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier will start hearing evidence on April 27 at the Laval courthouse for at least three days.
The Montreal Police Brotherhood and City of Montreal attempted to block the inquiry, which was originally ordered in 2008, on the grounds that all previous investigations exonerated the officer who killed Bennis of any wrongdoing.
On the way to an unrelated police matter, Constable Yannick Bernier twice shot Bennis, 25, on the morning of Dec. 1, 2005.
Bennis was returning home from morning prayers at his mosque when the incident occurred in Côte-des-Neiges. The police allege that Bennis attacked Bernier with a kitchen knife and Bernier retaliated in self-defence.
Najlaa Bennis, Anas Bennis’ sister, rejected the police’s version of events. In the aftermath of the shooting, she wrote a letter to The Gazette claiming that violence was completely out of character for her brother.
The police union abandoned its request to quash the inquiry last year when a similar request was denied in the matter of the death of Michel Berniquez in 2003. Berniquez died while in the custody of Montreal police.
“Ultimately, the hope is that the coroner’s inquiry will play a role in finally allowing us to find out what happened on that morning of Dec. 1, 2005,” said Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a spokesperson for Justice for Anas, a group that is demanding further investigations into Bennis’ death.
Shaheen-Hussain is leery of the inquest’s effectiveness because the coroner cannot make legally binding decisions, and she wondered whether the inquiry will address whether racial profiling played any role in the shooting. Bennis was a Canadian of Moroccan decent.
The long delay for the inquiry and resistance from the police union and the city have frustrated Bennis’ family and Justice for Anas. Supporters regard the city’s conduct as hypocritical.
“On one hand the mayor says he wants ‘all light to be shed’ and on the other hand the city’s lawyer [Pierre-Yves Boisvert] is actively arguing for having the coroner’s inquest cancelled,” said Shaheen-Hussain.
Last week, Justice for Anas released a document that detailed over $40,000 in legal fees that the City of Montreal paid to the law firm Trudel Nadeau from November 2009 to February 2010. The firm represented the Montreal Police Brotherhood in the motion it filed to block the coroner’s inquest.
The group obtained the document through an access-to-information request to the City of Montreal and provided the information to The Link.
“The question is not the Bennis case; the question is what is the procedure,” said Darren Becker, a spokesperson for the mayor, addressing Justice for Anas’ accusation of inconsistency.
Becker would not comment directly about the document detailing the amount spent on the case, but said the city’s employees have the right to the city’s legal resources, even when it goes against mayoral policy. Becker said the mayor still stands by the statement that he wishes for transparency and that “all light be shed” on the incident.
Neither the Montreal Police Brotherhood nor their law firm Trudel Nadeau responded to a
request for comment on the legal fees.
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 20, published January 25, 2011.
