New Details Emerge About Ottawa Shooter

‘He Was Lost And Did Not Fit In’… Not A ‘High-Risk’… Police: Acted Alone…

he Islamic convert that police say killed a soldier in Ottawa and then rampaged through Canada’s parliament before being shot dead was a misfit and perhaps mentally ill, according to friends and family, while his troubled and transient past included robbery and drug offenses.

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, 32, a Canadian citizen, was identified by police on Thursday as the attacker in the incident that rocked Canada and sent shock waves abroad.

“(He) was lost and did not fit in. I his mother spoke with him last week over lunch, I had not seen him for over five years before that,” a woman who identified herself as Zehaf-Bibeau’s mother said in a statement provided to the Associated Press.

Police said Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed a soldier stationed at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Wednesday before running into the nearby parliament buildings, where he was shot and killed by guards in a flurry of gunfire.

U.S. officials said they had been advised that Zehaf-Bibeau was a convert to Islam.

Several years ago Zehaf-Bibeau was known to have attended the Masjid Al-Salaam mosque in Vancouver, where he met David Bathurst, also a convert to Islam, David’s father, John Bathurst, told Reuters. John Bathurst offered Zehaf-Bibeau some work with the family’s sprinkler company in 2011, but he only lasted two days on the job.

“We made a mistake in trying to help someone out,” Bathurst said, adding that while his son knew Zehaf-Bibeau from the mosque, the two men were not friends.

“We didn’t fire him, I don’t even remember why he quit. He probably just didn’t show up,” Bathurst said, adding that the company often employed men from the mosque and from Vancouver’s rough downtown eastside neighborhood for odd jobs.

“He was nondescript,” Bathurst said of Zehaf-Bibeau, adding that mental illness, not Islam, was behind the attack. “This guy acted alone. He’s a nutcase that acted alone.”

Wednesday’s shooting was the second attack on Canadian soldiers in a week. On Monday, Martin Couture-Rouleau, a 25-year-old who converted to Islam last year, rammed his car into two soldiers in the Quebec town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and was shot dead by police. One of the soldiers later died.

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