Illegal weapons. Evidence of Canadian Emergency Benefit (CEP) fraud. And tons of cash.
It is the highly suspicious cocktail that cost a total of $ 100,000 to the participants in an illegal party interrupted by the officers of the Tactical Intervention Group (GTI) of the Montreal police force, in June 2020.
The police had tumbled into the Airbnb in Old Montreal after seeing the revelers showing off their guns and a plastic bag containing their small fortune on the Snapchat social network. A clip of rapper Ilyes Harmali (aka KBG) was reportedly filmed earlier in the evening. Several of the participants are dragging criminal files.
IMAGE FROM YOUTUBE
Ilyes Harmali
Last week, Judge Yvan Poulin ruled that the tens of thousands of dollars found in the pockets of 15 of the revelers would not be returned to them. And for the first time, justice made a connection between illegal weapons and fraud at the PCU.
Thus, the phone of a man named Mouad Rasmi would have been used to shoot the Snapchat video where men “manipulate and point” three illegal firearms “against a background of rap music”. “An in-depth analysis [du même appareil] supports the latter’s participation in a fraudulent scheme in connection with the Canadian Emergency Benefit, ”wrote the judge in his decision dated November 23. The phone contained in particular “the personal data and profiles of several third parties”.
Several of the other revelers explained to Judge Poulin that their nest egg came from the PCU.
A man named Fares Ouassel said that the $ 7,000 in cash he had in his bag came from the federal program. Anis Mezari was barely out of prison, but the equivalent of $ 4,000 in banknotes found on him came from the PCU, he vowed. Other participants with thousands of dollars on them claimed they had touched an inheritance from a foreign country.
According to our research, Mr. Rasmi has not been charged with fraud.
The money “does not legitimately belong to them”
This was too much for Judge Poulin, who decided that the $ 100,000 confiscated would go to the public treasury.
“The money was separated and distributed among the respondents during the period of resistance following the intervention of the GTI and […] it does not belong to them legitimately and individually “, wrote the magistrate, considering that it was about the only” reasonable “assumption.
“This observation stems not only from the general circumstances of the police intervention, but also from the specific chronology of the events, from the fact that the bag as shown on the Snapchat video was not found, from the long delay to evacuate the premises , the real evidence produced at the hearing, the context in which the money is individually seized on the fifteen respondents, as well as their respective testimonies. ”
The revelers were represented by Me Günar Dubé and Me Serge Lamontagne. The two lawyers declined to comment on the case.
Meanwhile, six of the revelers were charged with illegal possession of weapons in the wake of the police raid. Three of them, including Ilyes Harmali, aka KBG, pleaded guilty. The other three were acquitted.
Illegal weapons bought with the PCU?
According to our information, at least some of the individuals targeted by this judgment are linked to the STL, a street gang present in particular in the borough of Saint-Léonard.
A few months ago, a source close to the criminal community confided to Press that members of a street gang in northeast Montreal – which would not be the STLs – had found a flaw in the PCU’s allocation system and thus fraudulently obtained tens of thousands of dollars which would have been used to buy guns on the black market.
According to our source, the word would then have passed between different gangs or individuals in the criminal community.
According to our information, the police have also received certain information to this effect which probably came from sources in the field.
Press asked the commander of the Organized Crime Division (DCO) of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), Francis Renaud, whether the fruits of PCU fraud could have been used to buy illegal weapons.
“I cannot prove that guns were paid for with PCU frauds. Has there been fraud at the PCU? Yes, there were plenty. But all kinds of scams are good. There, we had the PCU, and everyone got into it and found loopholes, with false names, names of dead people, etc. But to say that this fraud was specifically used to buy guns? We have no specific investigation to demonstrate this. But can it be? Certainly it can, ”replied Renaud.
According to Commander Renaud, the price of a handgun varies between $ 3,000 and $ 5,000 on the black market in Montreal.
Most of the illegal handguns seized by the SPVM were acquired in different ways, not just from organized crime, and largely originated in the United States.