(Halifax) Ontario’s police watchdog says no criminal charges should be laid against two RCMP officers who mistakenly shot a bystander outside a Halifax fire station. Nova Scotia as they searched for the man responsible for a mass shooting that left 22 people dead.
In April 2023, the Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU) was tasked with determining whether the investigation had revealed new information about what happened at the Onslow Fire Hall on April 19, 2020 .
A few months later, the SIU confirmed that new information had been released. The unit then began investigating whether those findings could have impacted Nova Scotia’s police watchdog’s decision in March 2021 to clear the officers of wrongdoing.
In a report released Friday, the SIU said the investigator learned that the man police believed to be the killer denied fleeing just before the two officers opened fire, and that he had insisted he did not hear specific orders from the police, contrary to what the officers testified.
The SIU concluded, however, that no criminal charges were warranted because the police had reasonable grounds to believe that the man they were targeting was the killer and that he would “continue his massacre.”
The SIU report argues that the new evidence does not point to a more incriminating scenario of what happened that day, because it is reasonable to believe that both officers acted in a justified manner.