The 'religious crack addict’ who took a well-worn path to jihad

At the Ottawa Mission shelter for the homeless, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was a new arrival who quickly made his mark among the down-and-outs of the Canadian capital.

A loud-mouthed drifter, lecturing fellow residents about Islam, ranting about the government's failure to issue him with a passport, he also spoke of his drug habit, which he had tried to kick but pursued even while staying there.

It is an odd contrast on the surface. But among the violent underworld of misfit youths attracted to conversion and jihad, mental ill-health and drug addiction are a recurring theme.

Analysts of the Syrian war, for example, point to a regular stream of jihadist propaganda directed to such young men, telling them that their problems are due to the West's decadence. Refuge can be found in the pure world of the Islamic Caliphate.

Zehaf-Bibeau grew up up in the suburban comfort of middle-class Montreal, once attending a prestigious Roman Catholic private school, but before his final outrage he was bumping along from one court appearance to the next.

When he killed a reserve soldier at the National War Memorial in Ottawa last Wednesday, he was angry and wanted to leave Canada, according to a friend and fellow shelter resident. "He'd had enough of this country," said Damian Langman, also a Muslim convert. "He said he wanted to get away, he wanted to study the Koran, he wanted to sort his head out and get clean."

If Zehaf-Bibeau thought a "reversion" to Islam and engagement in jihad would cleanse his mind, he was far from the first. Another who fell prey to that temptation was Abdel Bary, a former rapper from Maida Vale in London.

He once sang about using drugs, but then joined Isil and posted photographs of himself carrying the severed head of a Syrian soldier.

There are similarities in the path trodden by Zale Thompson, a disturbed 32-year-old New Yorker, who the day after the Ottawa attack walked up to a pair of police officers in Queens and attacked them with an axe.

It later emerged that Thompson, who was killed by police at the scene, was a Muslim convert who had raged online about "jihad" against the West.

Quite where Zehaf-Bibeau, 32, wanted to make his escape before he went on the rampage that ended with his death inside Canada's parliament was unclear. He told some at the homeless shelter that he wanted to move to Libya, the homeland of his father, a country where he had spent time in his boyhood.

The previous week, he had lunch with his mother – a French-Canadian and senior government official from whom he had cut himself off for five years, telling her that he wanted to travel to Syria.

But he could go nowhere without a passport. Instead, he shot Cpl Nathan Cirillo, an unarmed honour guard at the war memorial, and was then felled in a hail of bullets in the marble hallways of parliament, barely half a mile from the bunk bed rooms of the Ottawa Mission.

Zehaf-Bibeau left no hate-filled or self-justifying rationale for his rampage. But there were plenty of clues to be gleaned from the mess of his life and his connections with other Canadian converts who had gone to wage jihad in Syria.

He arrived at the shelter on Oct 2 from western Canada, where he had been living for several years, intent on obtaining a new passport.

He submitted the paperwork, but his application was held up, not – as first reported – because he was on a "high-risk traveller" list, but because of background checks into his criminal past.

"He just kept going on about how this place was driving him crazy and he needed the passport so that he could get out," recalled Lloyd Maxwell, another resident at the shelter, where Zehaf-Bibeau prayed five times a day in hallways and stairwells.

It also emerged that he applied for a Libyan passport, but that application also ground to a halt because he lacked the Canadian paperwork.

Early on Wednesday, he drove back to Ottawa to launch his attack.

Even to Zehaf-Bibeau's deranged mind, it must have been clear he was on a suicide mission: he was armed only with an old Winchester rifle. Winchesters may have been the "gun that won the West", but this weapon holds a maximum of eight bullets and must be manually reloaded between each shot.

Zehaf-Bibeau was never going to win a gun battle with the armed police guarding parliament.

His battle with his demons went back as far as 2011, when he was in such desperate straits that he tried to rob a McDonald's restaurant in Vancouver in order to go to jail and receive rehabilitation for crack cocaine addiction.

After trying to hold it up with with a sharpened stick, he waited calmly to be arrested. He described himself in court as a "religious crack addict" who was seeking to "sacrifice freedom" and turn his life around.

Hours before this incident, he had gone to a police station asking to be "punished" for an armed robbery he claimed to have committed a decade earlier. But officers were unable to find any record of the crime.

A psychiatric report submitted to the court said: "He has been a devoted Muslim for seven years and he believes he must spend time in jail as a sacrifice to pay for his mistakes in the past, and he hopes to be a better man when he is eventually released."

By this time Zehaf-Bibeau had already been barred from the mosque where he had created waves by calling for non-Muslims to be excluded from the building during an inter-faith programme.

"We told him if he was not OK with that he should choose another mosque," said Aasim Rashid, spokesman for the British Columbia Muslim Association. The spat did little to change Zehaf-Bibeau's lone and tortured pursuit of redemption.

He also followed the internet posts of a Canadian jihadist now fighting in Syria, Abu Khalid Al Kanadi, who had urged "attacks on Canada".

In a last message on Wednesday before his Twitter account was deleted, Kanadi condemned Canada for sending jet fighters to join the US-led campaign against Isil, adding: "True Muslims, fulfill your duty of jihad in Canada."

Zehaf-Bibeau may have believed that he was doing just that.

An inscription in his high yearbook from 2000 predicted great things.

"Mike is a sociable and intelligent guy," wrote one classmate. "He loves to laugh, and his smile wins over the girls. He will go far in life."

But somewhere, between the drugs and a lonely pursuit of solace, the direction of travel went wrong.