Abdirazak Mahdi Ahmed has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for his involvement in the shooting at Montreal’s Yeshiva Gedola Jewish school, nearly three years after bullets struck its entrance.

Quebec Court Judge Pierre Labelle imposed the 66-month sentence Monday, November 9, accepting a joint recommendation from the Crown and defence, the Montreal Gazette reported. The judge called the 23-year-old a “coward.”

“A person who commits this kind of an attack on schools is, in the eyes of this court, a coward,” Labelle said, according to the Gazette.

Ahmed pleaded guilty in September to discharging a firearm. He has been in custody since his arrest in May 2024. Rebel News previously reported that his time already spent in detention would be deducted from the sentence.

The shooting happened shortly before 5 a.m. on November 12, 2023, in Côte-des-Neiges. Nobody was inside the school and no one was injured. Police found three bullet holes in the entrance and four 9 mm shell casings outside, JNS reported.

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As Rebel News previously reported, the attacker arrived in an Acura RDX stolen the previous day in Vaudreuil-Dorion. Police recovered the SUV hours later in Lachine, where they found projectiles, a balaclava, a surgical mask and latex gloves.

Investigators found Ahmed’s DNA on items inside the vehicle. Cellphone records placed his device near the school, and statements he made to an undercover officer placed in his cell helped connect him to the crime.

At the guilty plea hearing, investigators said they had not established antisemitism as the motive, as Rebel News reported.

Yeshiva Gedola and Azrieli Talmud Torah had both been targeted by gunfire three days before the November 12 attack. Prosecutors said there was no evidence connecting Ahmed to those earlier school shootings or other attacks on Jewish institutions.

Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s director of research and advocacy, told JNS the sentence represented an important step toward accountability for attacks on Jewish institutions. He also warned that young people willing to carry out such attacks add to the fear felt by Jewish Canadians.