"IT'S A NIGHTMARE": MONTREAL POLICE OFFICER KILLED IN HILTON HOTEL AMBUSH — THE FIRST OFFICER DEATH IN LINE OF DUTY IN 24 YEARS

A Monday Morning That Shook a City

At 11:35am on Monday, June 22, 2026, emergency services in Montreal received a call about something rarely seen even in a large urban environment: a person pointing a long gun out of a window at the Hilton hotel in the city's Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. Officers responding to that call found themselves in a gunfight. When it was over, one of their colleagues was dead, another was seriously injured, a civilian had died, and the gunman lay shot dead by police on the street outside the hotel.

Montreal Police Chief Fady Dagher did not reach for euphemism when he addressed the media. "It's a very, very sad day," he told reporters. "It's a nightmare." He confirmed what made this day exceptional even beyond the horror of the shooting itself: it was the first time in 24 years that a Montreal police officer had been killed in the line of duty.

What Happened: A Sequence Reconstructed From Witness Accounts and Video

The timeline begins with that emergency call at 11:35am, reporting a person sticking a gun out of an upper-floor window at the Hilton hotel on Queen Mary Road, in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood — one of Montreal's most densely populated and diverse areas, home to university campuses, hospitals, and busy commercial streets.

Officers arrived and almost immediately came under fire. Critically, the gunman had not remained at the window — video footage posted on social media, and reviewed by multiple outlets, shows him outside the hotel itself, on street level, during the exchange of fire. He was wearing an olive-coloured jacket and cargo pants and was carrying a long gun — a rifle recovered from the scene by police afterward.

Jacob Coutu, a construction worker active nearby at the time, described what he heard and saw: "I heard four or five gunshots" at first, he said, followed by a surge of police vehicles arriving at the scene. "We saw cops getting in a gunfight, getting shot down." He estimated that over the full course of the incident he heard between 30 and 40 gunshots — a figure that conveys the sustained, prolonged nature of the exchange rather than a brief, single confrontation.

The social media footage that circulated in the aftermath — footage that Quebec's Domestic Security Minister Ian Lafrenière explicitly urged the public not to share, out of respect for those killed — appears to show the exchange of gunfire between police and the gunman. According to NBC News' analysis of the video, an unarmed civilian approaches an officer and the officer turns toward the person; a gunshot is heard and the civilian collapses, though whether the shot came from the officer or from the gunman in crossfire cannot be determined from the footage alone. The person in the olive jacket then approaches a planter, appears to exchange direct fire with an officer who moves away, and then attempts to reload his rifle before collapsing amid further gunfire.

At some point during this exchange, a female police officer was also injured, described by Police Chief Dagher as seriously hurt but in stable condition. By the time the gunfight concluded, three people were dead: the gunman, shot by police; Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, aged 34, the officer killed in the line of duty; and a civilian whose cause of death remained under active investigation at the time of the latest reporting, with police declining to clarify publicly who fired the shot that killed the civilian.

A long gun — the weapon the suspect was seen carrying in the footage — was recovered from the scene by investigators.

The Officer Who Was Killed

Montreal police formally identified the fallen officer late Monday evening: Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34 years old, who had been a member of the Montreal police service since 2021 — five years on the force before his death. "His demise is a great loss to our organisation," the service said in a statement issued in both French and English.

Police Chief Dagher's statement that this was the first line-of-duty death of a Montreal officer in 24 years places the gravity of Monday's loss in its proper institutional and historical context. For a major urban police force, 24 years without losing an officer in the line of duty represents an extraordinary record — one that makes this loss not merely a personal tragedy for Constable Benredouane's family and colleagues, but a rupture of a long period of hard-won safety that the force had maintained even through years of responding to violent incidents across the city.

The City's Emergency Response

The scale and speed of Montreal's emergency response in the minutes following the first exchange of gunfire illustrates how rapidly authorities assessed the threat as potentially extending beyond the immediate hotel vicinity.

Public safety officials issued a formal emergency alert — the kind sent to all mobile phones in the affected area — warning residents of an armed and dangerous suspect and instructing them to shelter in place. This alert triggered a series of cascading responses across the city's infrastructure. The Décarie expressway, a major north-south highway through the heart of Montreal, was temporarily closed. Two of the city's metro lines had significant sections shut down as a precautionary measure. People were photographed running out of a nearby shopping centre as the emergency alert reached their phones.

The shelter-in-place alert remained in effect until approximately 3:00pm — roughly three and a half hours after the initial emergency call — when authorities lifted it, confirming that the immediate threat had been neutralised. Police Chief Dagher confirmed that the suspect was already dead before the emergency alert had even been issued, meaning the alert served as a precautionary measure to allow police to clear and secure the scene rather than a live warning about an ongoing fleeing suspect.

A Montreal police helicopter was visible above the area throughout the afternoon. Officers continued to work the scene of the shooting — which police characterised as spanning multiple locations across the street outside the hotel — well into the evening.

Not a Terrorist Attack — But a Warning About a Manifesto

Quebec's Domestic Security Minister Ian Lafrenière, a former Montreal police officer himself, held a press conference in which he confirmed that the matter had been referred to Quebec's independent police watchdog — the body that investigates all deaths and serious injuries involving police — and explicitly said he would not comment on the suspect's identity or motives while that independent investigation was underway.

He did, however, confirm two things that together paint a troubling picture of at least some of the context surrounding the attack. First, he confirmed that multiple federal agencies had been consulted, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and that investigators had concluded the shooting was not a terrorist attack. Second — and separately, and without apparent direct connection to the specific incident — Lafrenière acknowledged that some video footage of the shooting was circulating on social media and urged the public not to share it.

Independently, a police spokesperson in British Columbia confirmed that law enforcement agencies across that province had been put on notice on Monday afternoon of "documentation or some type of manifesto" that appeared to call for police to be targeted with violence. Staff Sergeant Lindsey Houghton of the Surrey Police Service confirmed that the warning was issued by an intelligence unit operating out of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's British Columbia headquarters, timed to the "tragic events" in Montreal. This warning — about a potential manifesto calling for violence against police — arrived after and in apparent response to the Montreal shooting, and the precise relationship between that document and Monday's events in Côte-des-Neiges was not established in the reporting available at the time of writing.

It is important to be clear about the limits of what is currently known: investigators have not publicly confirmed who the suspect was, what his motive was, whether the manifesto warning was directly connected to him, or who shot the civilian who also died. All of these questions remain active lines of investigation for both Montreal police and the independent watchdog body now overseeing the probe.

A Neighbourhood in Shock

Côte-des-Neiges is one of Montreal's most socially and culturally diverse neighbourhoods — home to Université de Montréal, a major hospital network, and communities drawn from dozens of countries. The Hilton hotel on Queen Mary Road is a prominent midscale hotel serving business and leisure travellers. It is not an area associated with gun violence of this kind, and the sight of an armed man firing from an upper-floor window and engaging in a prolonged street-level gunfight with police outside a hotel in broad daylight on a Monday morning represented an extraordinarily shocking rupture of ordinary urban life.

Images from the scene showed people running from a nearby shopping centre as the emergency alert reached their phones, bystanders photographed looking out of hotel windows above the scene, and extensive police cordons establishing crime scene perimeters across multiple blocks of the surrounding streets.

For Montreal police, the mourning that follows any line-of-duty death is compounded by the rarity of this one. In the 24 years since Montreal last lost an officer in the line of duty, countless officers have responded to countless dangerous calls, have faced armed and dangerous individuals, and have returned home. Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, five years on the force, 34 years old, did not return home on Monday. That fact — more than any procedural detail of the investigation that will follow — is what will remain with his colleagues, his family, and the city in the days and weeks ahead.

Sources

1. NPR / Associated Press — "Gunman kills an officer at a Montreal hotel" (June 22-23, 2026) — npr.org
2. NBC News — "Police officer, civilian and gunman dead in Montreal shooting" (June 22, 2026) — nbcnews.com
3. ABC News / Associated Press — "Gunman kills a Montreal officer at a Hilton hotel before being shot dead, police say" (June 22, 2026) — abcnews.com
4. The Washington Post / Associated Press — "Gunman kills a Montreal officer at a Hilton hotel before being shot dead, police say" (June 22, 2026) — washingtonpost.com
5. KDH News / Associated Press — "Gunman kills a Montreal officer at a Hilton hotel before being shot dead, police say" (June 22, 2026) — kdhnews.com
6. Buffalo Toronto Public Media / Associated Press — "Gunman kills an officer at a Montreal hotel before being shot dead, police say" (June 23, 2026) — btpm.org

This is a breaking and developing story. The investigation into the suspect's identity, motive, and the circumstances surrounding the civilian death has been referred to Quebec's independent police watchdog and remains active. Details may change significantly as the investigation progresses.