Site of the attack, Oslo, Norway, 23 July 2011. Britta Pedersen/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.On 29 January 2017, a gunman opened fire in a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, killing six Muslim worshippers and wounding 19 others. 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a student at Laval University, and known for expressing far-right views, was named as the suspected shooter.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called the murders “a terrorist attack”, and though Quebecois prosecutors have so far only brought six charges of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder against Bissonnette, the attack meets any standard definition of terrorism. But the peculiarities of Canada’s criminal code, which requires prosecutors to prove ideological motivations and a group affiliation in order to charge a person for terrorist offences, makes it difficult for Canadian prosecutors to file this as a terrorism case.
For Norwegians, it struck an eerily familiar note. We are approaching the sixth year commemoration of the worst act of terrorism in modern Norwegian history. These attacks took place on 22 July 2011, when the white Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a massive bomb at government headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and proceeded to the small island of Utøya, where he massacred scores of defenceless teenagers attending the annual summer youth camp of the social-democratic Labor Party of Norway.
