(Toronto) Lawyers for the man accused of killing an OPP officer and wounding two others last week are denying the “ambush” thesis.
Updated yesterday at 20:00.
Alain Bellefeuille, 39, is charged with one count of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder in a May 11 shooting in which Ontario Provincial Police Sergeant Eric Mueller was presumed dead.
After the incident, OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique said Sergeant Mueller and two other officers were “ambushed” while responding to a report at a home in Bourget, east of Ottawa.
ONTARIO PROVINCE POLICE PHOTO BY CANADIAN PRESS
Sergeant Eric Mueller was killed in action.
“It was not an ambush,” Mr Bellefeuille’s lawyers, John Hale and Cassandra Richards, said in a statement on Friday.
“We hope the public – including potential jurors – will remain open to the possibility of alternative accounts of events. »
The statement said Mr Bellefeuille “neither requested nor expected the police to show up at his home in the middle of the night”.
He said Bellefeuille was asleep in his bed with the lights off when police arrived and he only called 911 “to get help” after the incident.
The lawyers said they would not comment further and that any further information about his actions that day “is reserved for the trial”.
Sergeant Mueller, 42, a father of two, was described as a model officer by his peers and those who paid their respects at his funeral this week. He is the tenth police officer killed on the job in Canada since September 2022 and the fifth to be shot in Ontario during the same period.
The Special Investigations Unit is investigating after the Ontario Provincial Police forensic team found evidence that one of the surviving officers fired his gun sometime after arriving at the scene.