Parliament Hill attack

Parliament Hill attack, shooting that took place at Parliament and the National War Memorial in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on October 22, 2014. The attack, carried out by former Canadian petroleum worker Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, left one person dead and raised questions about parliamentary security while also sparking a national debate over the nature of terrorism.

The shooter

Born in Canada to a Québécois mother and a Libyan father, Zehaf-Bibeau held dual Libyan-Canadian citizenship and had converted to Islam in adulthood after being raised a Catholic. He had a criminal record of petty crimes including drug offences. In the fall of 2014, Zehaf-Bibeau, a 32-year-old homeless man who struggled with cocaine addiction, had been living at the Ottawa Mission shelter. During the summer of 2014, Zehaf-Bibeau had been employed in the Canadian petroleum industry in Alberta.

After arriving in Ottawa, he stated that he wanted to travel to the Middle East to study religion and applied for a renewal of his Libyan passport. But he was stymied by the Libyan embassy’s demand for a time-consuming background check. After the shooting, his mother, Susan Bibeau, wrote in a letter to the Canadian media company Postmedia News that this refusal was a turning point for her son, whom she considered mentally unbalanced.

National War Memorial shooting

Zehaf-Bibeau bought a used 1995 Toyota Corolla and obtained a .30-30 Winchester hunting rifle on October 21. (Police believed he took the rifle from the home of an aunt who lived near Ottawa, whom he visited that day.) The next morning Zehaf-Bibeau parked his Corolla on Ottawa’s Wellington Street next to the National War Memorial. He walked to the plaza surrounding the memorial—where several soldiers were standing on ceremonial guard. Corp. Nathan Cirillo and fellow reservist Corp. Branden Stevenson were standing sentry when Zehaf-Bibeau approached them from behind and shot at both of them, shooting Cirillo fatally but missing Stevenson.

Parliament Hill attack

After shooting Cirillo, Zehaf-Bibeau ran toward Parliament Hill, across Wellington Street from the War Memorial, where he hijacked a vehicle parked on the curving driveway that sweeps around the front lawn of the Parliament Buildings. Zehaf-Bibeau drove it to the base of the Peace Tower, where he jumped from the vehicle and entered the Centre Block. Constable Samearn Son, an unarmed House of Commons security guard, confronted Zehaf-Bibeau inside the building and tried to wrestle away his rifle. Son was shot in the leg, however, and Zehaf-Bibeau charged down the Hall of Honour, an expansive hallway that runs the width of the Centre Block.

Inside the Hall of Honour, Zehaf-Bibeau was separated only by a set of doors from the Reading Room, where Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was meeting with Conservative Party members of Parliament. Across the Hall, New Democratic Party (NDP) members were meeting in another room. Alerted to the danger facing them, the politicians barricaded the doors to their meeting rooms, and some Conservative members took ceremonial flagpoles and prepared to wield them as spears. Meanwhile, Harper was placed briefly in hiding—inside a closet in the Reading Room—before he was whisked away to safety by police.

Shots rang out in the hall as guards and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) engaged in a gun battle with Zehaf-Bibeau. A House of Commons security guard shot Zehaf-Bibeau in the right arm, and he was killed moments later—just before 10 am—in a hail of gunfire delivered by RCMP officer Curtis Barrett and House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, Parliament’s chief security official, though the media attention to their heroic actions was focused on Vickers.

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As the episode unfolded, parts of Centre Block were evacuated before the building was locked down. All of Parliament Hill and much of downtown Ottawa, including the Rideau Centre shopping mall, were also locked down, restricting tens of thousands of people inside buildings within the police security perimeter. Police worked through the day to figure out whether Zehaf-Bibeau was acting alone or had accomplices still at large. No other attackers were discovered, and all lockdowns were lifted by 8:30 pm.

Aftermath

Politicians gathered in the House of Commons the day after the attack, during an unusually emotional session in which partisan conflict was replaced with collegial solidarity. This included the extraordinary spectacle of Harper crossing the floor of the Commons to the opposition side, where he shook hands and embraced both NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau amid the applause of the chamber.

A national public debate ensued about whether Zehaf-Bibeau was a radical Islamist terrorist or a mentally ill criminal. In his remarks to the Commons the day after the attack, Harper quickly condemned the shooting as a “terrorist attack” and told Canadians that he was “resolved to fight” terrorism both at home and abroad. The RCMP also characterized the attack as terrorism, and Trudeau said that he accepted the RCMP’s word. Mulcair said, however, that he would not use the word “terrorism” to characterize the attack, which was more likely rooted in the killer’s mental illness.

The original version of this entry was published by The Canadian Encyclopedia.