Quebec City mosque shooter obsessed with mass murderers since adolescence

'I regret not shooting more people,' Alexandre Bisonnette says in report presented during sentencing arguments
Alexandre Bissonnette's obsession with mass murderers started when he was an adolescent, and he had wanted to carry out a mass killing ever since, a Quebec City court heard on Monday.
A report written by social worker Guylaine Cayouette set off cries of horror inside the courtroom when it was presented as evidence on Monday by the Crown at sentencing arguments for the 28-year-old.
Bissonnette pleaded guilty in March to six counts of first degree murder, as well as six counts of attempted murder for the Jan. 29, 2017 shooting.
Quebec Superior Court Justice François Huot must decide whether Bissonnette will be eligible for parole after 25 years, or not at all. Huot has the possibility of adding up the parole eligibility sentences, which could mean 150 years behind bars.
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Cayouette, Bissonnette's liaison officer, filed the report after a meeting with him on Sept. 20, 2017. That day, she wrote, Bissonnette carried himself differently from the man she had met, almost weekly, since his arrest.
Bissonnette told her he was tired of playing a game, and that he remembered everything about the attack.
In contrast to his muddled responses to police immediately after the shooting, Bissonnette described in detail what happened when he approached the mosque in the Quebec City suburb of Sainte-Foy.
He said when he entered the prayer room, an old man grabbed his arm, presumably Azzeddine Soufiane, who tried to disarm Bissonnette that night.
"I shot him. I regret not shooting more people," he told Cayouette.

Inside the courtroom, families of the victims cried out as the report was read aloud. They also heard that Bissonnette said he could have killed anyone, not just Muslims.
When court adjourned for break, Bissonnette stood up looking directly at the audience, with what looked like a huge smile.
Hours scouring the Internet
Earlier in the day, the court heard how Bissonnette spent hours in front of his computer screen looking up mass shootings, Islam and U.S. immigration policies in the days leading up to the shooting.
During the month of January 2017, he typed in the words "shooting" and "shooter" 150 times in his search engine, a police report presented as evidence shows.
He also looked for information about the Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre and
the Muslim students association at Laval University 82 times during that month and 12 times in the hours before shooting.
Bissonnette seemed particularly interested in Dylann Roof, a white supremacist who killed nine churchgoers inside a church in South Carolina, searching for references to the mass murderer 201 times during that month.
He also looked up references to Marc Lépine, the man convicted of killing 14 women in 1989 at the Polytechnique engineering school, and looked into feminist groups at Laval University.
A photo of Bissonnette found on his computer shows him wearing a red baseball cap with the slogan used by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, Make America Great Again.
Bissonnette read several articles detailing Trump's executive order which would have temporarily banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
He also consulted Donald Trump's twitter feed on a daily basis, Jacques said.
The evidence presented on Monday supported information found in Bissonnette's interrogation video, which was presented last Friday.
Just two hours before entering the Sainte-Foy mosque and firing his gun 48 times, Bissonnette read a tweet from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which welcomed "those fleeing persecution" into Canada, according to evidence presented Monday.
Victim impact statements began Monday afternoon, with survivor Aymen Derbali.

Quebec mosque shooting victim describes how seven bullets destroyed his life
Aymen Derbali sat in a wheelchair and described how seven bullets destroyed his life − his words delivered with poignancy to a judge, to lawyers, to a hushed courtroom, and to the 28-year-old killer who sat only a few metres away.
Mr. Derbali addressed the court during a sentencing hearing for Alexandre Bissonnette, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the deaths of six men at a Quebec City mosque last year. As Mr. Derbali spoke, his words detailing how he’d become paralyzed and unable to hold his own children, Mr. Bissonnette sat to his right, watching from a glassed-in enclosure.
Mr. Derbali says he wakes up in the morning thinking the entire shooting was a nightmare. “But it wasn’t a nightmare,” he told the court, “it was real.”
It was a moment of emotion and drama in a day that offered a fuller portrait of the gunman in the mosque shooting, which shocked Canadians for its violence targeting a religious minority. It is the picture of someone who not only deliberately opened fire in a mosque, wounding Mr. Derbali and several others. For the first time, the court heard that Mr. Bissonnette fully recalled his actions the night of the shooting and confided to a social worker that he wished he had killed more people.
HANDOUT/REUTERS
And in the year prior to the shooting, Mr. Bissonnette had relentlessly fed his obsessions about Islam, firearms, mass killers and feminism through the internet.
He followed the Twitter feed of U.S. President Donald Trump, reading news and screening videos about the President on a daily basis. He also followed news about the Muslim travel ban that Mr. Trump ordered two days before Mr. Bissonnette carried out his armed attack.
He visited news sites and Twitter feeds of right-wing commentators south of the border. On the day of the attack, he had been consulting Breitbart News, the conservative news website.
The contents of Mr. Bissonnette’s laptop, analyzed by an RCMP officer, were presented by the Crown as the court weighs when, if ever, the killer would be eligible for parole.
The analysis reveals a man dwelling compulsively on themes of weapons and mass shootings. Notorious killers appear on his online history hundreds of times, including searches on Justin Bourque, who killed three Mounties in Moncton, and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who slaughtered nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
He also did searches related to Marc Lépine, who shot and killed 14 women at a Montreal engineering school in 1989.
Police delving Mr. Bissonnette’s online activity found searches on two women’s groups at Laval University, where Mr. Bissonnette had been a student. The groups are Féministes en Mouvement de l’Université Laval and Comité Femmes de l’Université Laval.
There were other surprising disclosures on Monday, as Mr. Bissonnette’s sentencing hearing entered its second week. In contrast to his confession to police in which he expressed concern about his victims, Mr. Bissonnette told a social worker in jail last year that he fully remembered the attack and wished he’d killed more people.
“It’s not true that I don’t remember, I remember everything,” he confided to the social worker, Guylaine Cayouette. He said that he heard people in the mosqueshouting “Allah” as he unloaded his pistol, and he remembered shooting a victim in the head.
He recalled how a man, presumably Azzeddine Soufiane, grabbed his arm to try to stop him. He killed him.
“I regret not having killed more people. The victims are in heaven, and I’m living through hell,” he said to the social worker.
He told Ms. Cayouette that he had idolized mass killers since adolescence, and had wanted to carry out a shocking gesture himself. Ms. Cayouette described Mr. Bissonnette as calm, coherent and articulate during the exchange.
Mr. Bissonnette’s father, for his part, couldn’t believe his son was a suspect in the shooting and believed there had been a misunderstanding. In an interview with police the day after the Jan. 29 attack, Raymond Bissonnette said his son had behaved normally the day of the crime.
Asked about whether his son had a girlfriend, Mr. Bissonnette replied that he didn’t, and this was tough for his son. He had trouble meeting women and suffered from “lack of self-esteem,” his father said.
The day ended, however, with Mr. Derbali, the first person to deliver a victim-impact statement to the court. He was shot at the mosque as he deliberately stood in the line of fire to distract Mr. Bissonnette, actions that Superior Court Justice François Huot described from the bench as an “incredible demonstration of courage.”
Crown prosecutor Thomas Jacques said that in video taken from one of the cameras inside the mosque, Mr. Derbali can be seen “very courageously and heroically” trying to stop the shooter. He was one of the first worshippers to try to do so, Mr. Jacques said.
After rolling up in his wheelchair and taking his place before the judge, Mr. Derbalistruggled to move his weakened hand to swear on the Koran. He said he regrets he will never be able to play soccer with his son again, and has to cope with “intolerable pain” from his injuries. He thinks of the men who were killed and the children who will never see their fathers.
“I thought of all my brothers who left 17 orphans behind,” he said. “They didn’t have this chance that I did to see my children again.”

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