by Gary Dimmock
Ottawa Citizen
The defining images of Ottawa’s child-torture case — the most horrific police officers say they’ve seen — were revisited Friday, showing the interrogation a former RCMP counter-terrorism investigator put his frightened, naked and shackled 11-year-old son through in their Kanata basement.
The series of haunting videos — 45 minutes, and 12 seconds in all — were seized from the 44-year-old father’s phone on the day of his arrest, hours after his emaciated son escaped his suburban dungeon in search of water on Feb. 12, 2013. He had been shackled in the basement next to a slop bucket as the rest of his family went about daily life upstairs.
The videotaped interrogations were first shown in court last year, reducing police detectives and lawyers to tears. It was one of those times when a courtroom really did fall silent.
The boy’s relatives were beside themselves. The boy’s father kept his head down for most of it, but rubbed his eyes after the few times he looked up at the screen. The father admitted this week that he confined his son in the basement, starved him and burned his genitals because he thought he was the devil.