Half of the investigators on the team responsible for finding the person who carried out the arson attack in Old Montreal have asked to be assigned to other investigations due to internal conflicts surrounding the handling of the case.
• Also read – Deadly fire in Old Montreal: Police mistakes complicate the investigation
Our investigations office learned that four of the eight investigators could no longer endure the difficult climate within the main team investigating the deadliest fire in the metropolis in almost 50 years.
This team is working on possible murder charges. Other groups of police officers are also being mobilized, particularly with regard to criminal negligence.
Two investigators left in the weeks following the March 16 tragedy.
Two more people then left the ship in mid-October, according to sources familiar with the matter. All have been replaced.
“It was a toxic work environment that led the four investigators to change teams,” says one of our sources, who wished to remain anonymous because she is not authorized to speak to the media.
“They asked to change the team because things were going so badly,” says another source.
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One of the people who asked to change teams had about fifteen years of experience in serious crimes, including almost ten years in homicide.
According to our information, it is very rare for a police team to become so empty in the middle of a major investigation.
Photo QMI Agency, Erik Peters
Yesterday, the Montreal Police Service (SPVM) responded to our questions by saying it “neither confirms nor denies such movements within its organization.”
According to our sources, one of the key elements of the conflict is the management of a video recorded by a surveillance camera on the evening of the tragedy. We see a suspect leaving the building on Place D’Youville shortly after the fire broke out.
Within the SPVM, some wanted to quickly arrest him for questioning, while others preferred to use various investigative techniques before questioning him.
SPVM director Fady Dagher was invited to Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parole on Sunday and nevertheless indicated that the investigation was going well. “In this case I see no error. […] “The people on the file have a lot of experience,” he said.
Restart the scan
Mr Dagher was responding to a report published last week in which we revealed that the investigation was stalled due to certain decisions made by police officers.
Fady Dagher archive photo, Jonathan Tremblay
In particular, we wrote that a suspect was arrested and then released without charge. The police officer who arrested him had neither an arrest warrant nor an entry warrant. Police also confiscated and searched a cell phone without a search warrant being available at the time.
We also learned that to reopen the case, investigators were specifically looking at court decisions from Western Canada, where courts are sometimes less restrictive about the admissibility of certain elements of evidence.
Last week, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante assured that she had “full confidence” in the police on this matter.
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