Several of the victims\u2019 family members sobbed in court after the judge read out the names of the six men killed in the attack, in which five others were seriously wounded.<\/b>
\nMONTREAL \u2014 A former university student who killed six men at a mosque in Quebec City early last year pleaded guilty to first-degree murder on Wednesday, hastening the conclusion of a case that shocked Canadians and underscored the presence of Islamophobia in multicultural Canada.
\u201cI\u2019ve thought about this a long time. In my heart, this is the decision I\u2019ve made,\u201d the gunman, Alexandre Bissonnette, 28, told a Quebec City courtroom, after previously pleading not guilty.
Several of the victims\u2019 family members sobbed openly in court after the judge read out the names of the six men killed in the attack, in which five others were seriously wounded, according to Mohamed Labidi, the president of the mosque, the Islamic Cultural Center of Quebec, who attended the proceedings.
Among those in attendance was Aymen Derbali, who was left paralyzed after being shot seven times when he tried to distract Mr. Bissonnette by staring directly at him so he would stop shooting others. The gunman\u2019s parents were also in court as their son read out his guilty plea.
Mr. Bissonnette\u2019s transformation from a seemingly soft-spoken politics student into a methodical killer shook Canada, a country that celebrates its tolerance and openness to immigrants. And with a trial averted, many questions remain unanswered.
Speaking in court, Mr. Bissonnette said he was neither a terrorist nor Islamophobic but had been \u201ccarried away by fear and a horrible form of despair,\u201d according to the CBC, the Canadian broadcaster.
In an open letter published in January, the gunman\u2019s parents, Manon Marchand and Raymond Bissonnette, called the crime \u201cinexcusable\u201d and \u201cunexplainable.\u201d \u201cLike all parents we hoped to see him succeed and be happy in life,\u201d they wrote.
Mr. Bissonnette faces a prison sentence of up to 150 years.
Although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau initially characterized the shooting as a \u201cterrorist attack on Muslims,\u201d Mr. Bissonnette was charged with murder rather than terrorism, and law enforcement officials have said that he was not part of a larger network.
After the attack, some of his friends told the Canadian news media that Mr. Bissonnette, a student at Universit\u00e9 Laval, had been bullied at school and had become in thrall to far-right anti-immigrant groups.
Mr. Labidi, the mosque\u2019s president, on Wednesday called the guilty plea a relief as it spared the victims\u2019 families from enduring a painful trial. \u201cThis way they won\u2019t have to relive those terrible events during a long and protracted trial, so this brings some measure of comfort,\u201d he said.
In an interview last week at the mosque, its windows still pocked with bullet holes, Mr. Labidi said the gunman had staked out the building for days before storming it around 8 p.m. on Jan. 29,2017, just as evening prayers were coming to an end \u2014 a time when the mosque was thronged with people.
After entering the building, Mr. Bissonnette went directly to the prayer room and began shooting,Mr. Labidi said. Worshipers were overcome with terror, and some hid in the basement, he added. Mr. Bissonnette\u2019s gun eventually jammed as he fled, averting even greater carnage.
\u201cWe are still trying to come to terms with what happened,\u201d Mr. Labidi said, adding that the attack had deeply shaken Quebec\u2019s Muslims and highlighted growing fissures in Quebec society, including intensifying Islamophobia.
The mosque had also been targeted in the months leading up to the shooting, including an incident in which someone left a severed pig\u2019s head on its doorstep. And in August, Mr. Labidi\u2019s car was set on fire outside his home, 36 hours after he announced plans for the building of a Muslim cemetery on city-owned land.
While some European countries have experienced revenge attacks against Muslims after a spate of terrorist strikes undertaken by radical Islamists, such instances are rare in Canada, where far-right groups have not resonated widely.
Mr. Labidi noted that Quebec\u2019s Muslims, many of whom are from northern Africa, had been warmly welcomed. Nevertheless, he said, anti-immigrant sentiment had been on the rise in recent months, and he blamed right-wing \u201ctrash radio\u201d programs and far-right groups such as La Meute, or Wolfpack, which calls Islam a threat to Quebec\u2019s way of life.
While Canada prides itself on embracing immigrants, the group has resonated with a small but vocal minority in Quebec, where a strong tradition of secularism was ingrained during a revolt against the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s. The group\u2019s animus has been particularly reserved for conservative Islam.
Last year, the Quebec government caused an outcry when it introduced a law on \u201creligious neutrality\u201d requiring that people show their faces when using or providing public services in places like buses, libraries and universities. Human rights advocates say the law unfairly singles out Muslim women who wear veils.
In December, the Quebec City police chief, Robert Pigeon, said that the number of hate crimes or hateful episodes aimed at Muslims or Muslim institutions had doubled in the previous 12 months .<\/p>\n

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