A gunman opened fire outside the Montreal headquarters of Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, on June 22, killing a police officer and a civilian before being shot dead by responding officers — the first time a Montreal police officer has been killed in the line of duty in 24 years. A 104-page manifesto found in the suspect’s hotel room called for violence against the global pornography industry.
A suspect armed with a long gun opened fire Monday at a Montreal hotel, killing a police officer before officers returned fire, killing him, police said. A civilian also died but it wasn’t immediately clear who fired that shot.
Police Chief Fady Dagher said a second officer was seriously injured in the shooting in the city’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood but is in stable condition. The chief said it was the first time in 24 years that a Montreal police officer had been killed in the line of duty. “It’s a very, very sad day. It’s a nightmare,” he told reporters.
The setting of this shooting was not incidental, investigators would later determine. On June 22, 2026, a shooting occurred outside the headquarters of Aylo, a multinational conglomerate involved in internet pornography, including the pornographic video-sharing website Pornhub, in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
How the Attack Unfolded
Dagher said someone called emergency services around 11:35 a.m. about a person who was sticking a gun out of a window at the Hilton hotel.
On June 22, at 11:35 AM, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) responded to a 911 call after a witness saw a gun sticking out of a window at the Hilton Garden Inn Montreal Midtown, and reported hearing gunshots. The gunman appeared to be shooting at the sixth floor of the building across from the hotel, where employees of Aylo, the owners of Pornhub and other pornographic sites, were working.
Videos shared on social media showed the gunman, wearing camouflage tactical gear, crouching behind a pillar outside the Hilton Garden Inn Montreal Midtown, firing a rifle at two police officers a few metres away. One officer took cover behind a planter; the other one, who appeared to be struck, crawled behind a parked car, where he remained motionless.
Jacob Coutu, who was working in construction near the shooting, said he heard “four of five gunshots” on Monday morning. A few minutes later, he said police officers started arriving at the scene in large numbers, and he heard more gunfire. “We saw cops getting in a gunfight, getting shot down,” Coutu said. He estimates he heard 30 or 40 gunshots.
Dagher said the suspect, who was armed with a long gun, was killed at the scene. Officers do not believe there was a second shooter, he added.
Who Died
The fallen officer was identified as Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, who had been with the service since 2021, police said in a statement late Monday. “His demise is a great loss to our organization,” the service said.
A volunteer for the ZAKA volunteer emergency response service identified the civilian victim as 68-year-old, Israeli-Canadian Michael Mizrahi.
Further videos on social media appeared to show one officer accidentally fatally shooting a civilian.
Police Chief Fady Dagher claimed he did not know who shot the civilian.
The unresolved question of exactly how Mizrahi died — whether by the gunman’s fire or, as some circulating video appears to suggest, accidentally by a responding officer — is itself part of why Quebec’s independent police oversight body has opened a formal investigation into the police response.
Who the Suspect Was
Although police have yet to identify the shooter, the Quebec coroner’s office identified the shooter as 25-year-old Seth Scott Hatfield (2001 – June 22, 2026), a resident of Lethbridge, Alberta. He was a student at the University of Lethbridge, where he studied philosophy.
The shooter was allegedly linked to incel subculture after a violent 104-page manifesto targeting women was found in a hotel room. The shooter wrote that online pornography, including Pornhub, was responsible for a large part of the suffering of men. In the manifesto, the shooter called for the targeting of pornography industry conventions, the headquarters of global pornography companies, as well as prominent pornographic film actors and actresses. Pickup artists and plastic surgeons were also among groups targeted in the shooter’s manifesto.
A 25-year-old philosophy student travelling from Alberta to Montreal, armed and equipped to mount a sustained assault against a specific corporate target identified in a lengthy written ideological document, represents the kind of premeditated, targeted political violence that Canadian authorities now treat with the same investigative seriousness — multi-agency consultation, motive assessment, copycat-risk warnings — historically reserved for terrorism cases, even when, as officials in this instance concluded, the legal threshold for a terrorism designation was not met.
Not Terrorism, Officials Say — But Treated With Equal Urgency
Quebec Domestic Security Minister Ian Lafrenière said he would refrain from commenting on details about the suspect’s identity and motives since the matter is now under investigation by an independent police watchdog, which investigates injuries and deaths involving police. But he confirmed multiple agencies were consulted, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, before investigators concluded that the shooting was not a terrorist attack.
Lafrenière, a former Montreal police officer, also acknowledged that there are some videos circulating of the shooting and he urged members of the public not to share them out of respect for those who were killed. A police spokesperson in British Columbia said forces across the province were told of the possibility of “documentation or some type of manifesto” calling for police to be targeted with violence.
This is a notable distinction: despite the explicit, written ideological motivation behind the attack — and despite the suspect’s specific, named corporate target — Canadian authorities have classified this as a non-terrorism case, even while treating the manifesto’s contents seriously enough to issue province-wide warnings about potential copycat attacks against police officers specifically, not merely against the pornography industry that was the gunman’s original stated target.
A Pattern That Predates This Attack
It was the third time a Canadian police officer has been killed in the line of duty this month. Ontario Provincial Police Constable Tarun Bali was run over while trying to apprehend a motorist near Hearst, Ont., on June 9. Two days later, a Toronto tactical officer, Constable Marc Pinizzotto, was shot dead while executing a search warrant. In Saskatchewan, a man was charged with attempted murder on Monday after two RCMP officers were shot and wounded outside a home in Melville, where police were called to what one neighbour described as a property dispute.
That Constable Benredouane’s death is the third Canadian police officer killed in the line of duty within a single month — following deaths in Ontario and Toronto, and alongside a separate Saskatchewan shooting that wounded two more officers — represents a concentration of fatal violence against Canadian law enforcement that significantly exceeds historical norms, even before accounting for the specific ideological dimension of Monday’s Montreal attack.
The Community and the Company Respond
Mayor of Montreal Soraya Martinez Ferrada expressed her condolences to the family of the slain police officer and ordered the City of Montreal to fly its flags at half-mast.
Aylo issued a statement to the media expressing their condolences to the families of the victims and gratitude to first responders for protecting their employees. Employees of the company were present during the shooting.
The CN Tower will dim for the first five minutes of every hour to commemorate the officer killed.
In a statement, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was “horrified” that a police officer and a civilian were killed and others injured in a shooting in Montreal. Carney said his thoughts are with the victims, their loved ones, first responders and the Côte-des-Neiges community, and offered thanks to police officers for their “heroic dedication” in protecting communities.
LoudFact.com is an independent global news and explainer platform. This report is based on reporting from NPR, NBC News, ABC News, RNZ, CNN, Global News, The Globe and Mail, and Wikipedia’s documentation of the 2026 Côte-des-Neiges shooting as of June 22-24, 2026.
