Montreal police planned high-risk arrest of killer at motel, coroner told

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Suspected triple-killer Abdulla Shaikh was holed up in Room 139 of a seedy St-Laurent motel in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 4, 2022, his door barricaded on the inside with two chairs and a table.

He was probably armed and it would be a high-risk arrest. Police worried passersby, other Motel Pierre guests or officers could get shot, either by accident or intentionally by Shaikh.

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“The consensus was we couldn’t permit him to leave where he was,” Jean-Philippe Bergeron, a member of the Montreal police tactical squad, told a coroner’s inquest on Tuesday.

He said the element of surprise was crucial — to take him alive, police had to grab Shaikh before he could reach for a weapon.

Bergeron was the first to look through the doorway just before 7 a.m. after two other officers with a battering ram twice struck the door, managing to open it about halfway.

“I saw the subject was in bed but getting up and he had a gun in his right hand,” he said. “Before I can react, I see a flash and hear his gun going off.”

The officer said he fired back — four times — in Shaikh’s direction before backing out and crouching behind the room’s exterior brick wall. A stun grenade was thrown in, setting off a bright flash and a loud noise to destabilize Shaikh. Another officer also shot once toward Shaikh, who was later pronounced dead at the scene.

Bergeron was describing the dramatic showdown to coroner Géhane Kamel, who is conducting an inquiry into the deaths of Shaikh and the three people police say he killed within a 24-hour period.

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On Monday, Kamel heard that Shaikh killed André Lemieux, 64, and Mohamed Salah Belhaj, 48, on two Montreal streets on Aug. 2 before driving to Ontario and visiting the Toronto Zoo and the nearby Canada’s Wonderland amusement park the next morning.

Shaikh then returned to Quebec and killed Alexis Lévis-Crevier, 22, on a street in Laval on the night of Aug. 3.

Months before he was killed, an administrative tribunal decided Shaikh could continue residing outside a mental-health institution. He had been released from the institution in 2021 even though a psychiatrist determined he represented “a significant risk to public safety due to his mental state.”

Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Shaikh did not take his medication regularly, his family told police after his death.

No connections were found between Shaikh and any of his victims and police concluded they were chosen randomly.

Early on the morning of Aug. 4, police found the car Shaikh had been driving — a 2019 white Dodge Challenger — in the parking lot of a Tim Hortons restaurant on Marcel-Laurin Blvd. in the St-Laurent borough. Witnesses confirmed he was in the nearby Motel Pierre.

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Claude Thibault, a sergeant on the tactical squad, told the inquiry on Monday that the motel was well-known to police. Officers were often called there, he said.

“It’s known for prostitution, drugs, trafficking — a multitude of calls,” Thibault said. “It’s a place where you can rent without many ID cards, paying cash.”

On Tuesday, the inquest also heard from Eric Jr. Achan Teke, who owned the Dodge Challenger used during the killing spree. Teke said he rented out the muscle car to Shaikh via the Turo car-sharing platform.

He picked it up four days before the first killing.

“He was very calm and didn’t talk much,” Teke said in his statement to police. “It seems he was in a rush to go somewhere.”

The public hearings are scheduled to continue until mid-October.

ariga@postmedia.com

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