Coroner's inquest begins Monday into 2019 killing of Montreal woman and her two sons

Police canvas the area outside a home after the discovery of three bodies in an east-end Montreal, Wednesday, Dec.11, 2019. Police say the bodies of a woman, 42, and two boys, ages 4 and 2, were found today in Montreal's Pointe-aux-Trembles district. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

Public hearings into a 2019 triple homicide that claimed the lives of a mother and her two children in Montreal's Pointe-aux-Trembles borough begin Monday at the Joliette justice service point.

In July 2022, Chief Coroner Pascale Descary ordered a public inquest into the killing of 42-year-old Dahia Khellaf and her two sons, aged four and two, Adam and Aksil, as well as the suicide of 46-year-old Nabil Yssaad, Khellaf's partner and father of the two children.

Descary's announcement followed the submission of four damning reports by coroner Alain Manseau on the killings.

Nabil Yssaad had gone to a Lanaudière hospital, where he threw himself from the sixth floor on December 10, 2019, and it was while trying to warn his relatives that police officers later discovered the three bodies lying side by side in Khellaf's bed. According to Coroner Manseau, all indications were that the three had been strangled in their sleep with an electric cable.

The couple had been united by an arranged marriage during a trip Khellaf had taken to Algeria, her country of origin, in 2012. She had then returned alone and sponsored the entry of her husband, who arrived in Canada in 2014.

The relationship deteriorated as soon as Mr. Yssaad arrived in Quebec in 2014. Coroner Manseau's reports read like a long and escalating series of belittling and contemptuous remarks about her, threats, and violent gestures that were to give rise to repeated police interventions that were to culminate in Khellaf's decision to get a divorce in 2018, a move abandoned when she discovered she was not eligible for legal aid.

The marital climate did not improve, and she went to her local police station, where she reported her husband for death threats in August 2018.

There began a round of arrests, indictments, releases, breaches of conditions and constant lies to the authorities from Yssaad, who openly mocked the conditions imposed on him even in front of judges.

No less than a year-and-a-half of judicial proceedings for domestic violence followed, during which seven different prosecutors took turns, the last of whom, at the beginning of December 2019, had virtually no experience in such matters.

In his report, Coroner Manseau criticized both the police and judicial authorities, as well as the various parties involved, for not taking the trouble to ensure adequate follow-up of the situation despite the obvious dangerousness of the individual.

In a press release issued by the Coroner's Office on July 20, 2022, it stated that "new facts have been brought to the attention of the Coroner's Office, such that the Chief Coroner considers it useful to hear witnesses to establish the circumstances of the four deaths as accurately as possible."

Coroner Andrée Kronström has been appointed to preside over the public inquest beginning Monday. She will be assisted by Roxanne Lefebvre, a public inquiry attorney.

Public hearings will be held from Oct. 23 to 27 and from Nov. 6 to 10.

-With files from The Canadian Press' Pierre Saint-Arnaud 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Oct. 22, 2023.