Arrested Sunday in Trois-Rivières for the second time in three days while trying to disrupt the activities of Prime Minister François Legault, anti-vaccine protester François Amalega Bitondo will not be able to find his freedom immediately.
The 43-year-old man, who has more than $ 40,000 in tickets for non-compliance with sanitary measures, has been officially charged with failing to comply with two release conditions resulting from an arrest on Friday, while he was trying to disturb a speech by François Legault.
Mr. Amalega was released shortly after this first arrest on Friday, in return for a pledge not to be within 300 meters of the prime minister. However, this Sunday, he probably ignored this order, deciding to wait for François Legault at the exit of the CAQ congress, in Trois-Rivières, with about fifteen other demonstrators, which earned him two new accusations of breakage. prescription.
The Crown opposed his release on Monday, arguing that Mr. Amalega’s detention is necessary to ensure his presence in court and that he poses a high risk of reoffending.
The protester, who chose to represent himself without a lawyer, will therefore spend the night in Trois-Rivières prison and will remain there until the end of his release investigation, which is due to begin on Tuesday. “I have the impression that I cannot present a defense”, he complained, after the judge of the Court of Quebec granted the request of the Crown to keep him detained until the end. of the process.
Mr. Amalega does not believe in the seriousness of the pandemic and has been leading a real crusade against health measures for several months. He said in an interview to Press that he prefers to be “between four walls than to have the conscience imprisoned by collaborating in the lie”.
At the beginning of October, he was found guilty of obstructing the work of the police for an altercation in a grocery store which required the intervention of eight officers from the Police Department of the City of Montreal. Mr. Amalega, who refused to wear the mask in the store, was briefly arrested and fined for his act of provocation towards employees. However, he returned to the scene immediately after the police released him, forcing another muscular intervention from them.
His refusal to wear a mask during his trial several weeks later earned him seven days in prison. During the hearing, he compared her “conscientious refusal” to wear a face covering to the refusal of racial anti-segregation activist Rosa Parks to give way to a white man on a bus in 1955, making her a figure. emblematic of the civil rights movement. Justice Randall Richmond called this comparison “totally disproportionate” because it was only intended to strengthen the “victim position” that Mr. Amalega is trying to project publicly.