[LINK] Richard Warnica in the National Post on the insanity of Chiheb Esseghaier

[rfmcdonald]

Richard Warnica looks at the issue of mental health. What does it mean--for the man, for his trial--if his attempt at terrorism is the product of a mental health issue?

Esseghaier was born on Sept. 19, 1982, in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, the oldest of four boys in a close, nominally Muslim but largely secular family. As a boy, he was quiet and studious, according to multiple published interviews with those who knew him back home. “He was an ordinary student,” his friend Meriam Sassi told Reuters in 2013. “There was no sign of religious militancy.”

The young man excelled academically and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees by his mid-’20s. In 2008, he moved to Quebec to pursue a PhD, first at the University of Sherbrooke and then later at the prestigious Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS.) “He was an excellent student of biology,” Samir Galouli, a former colleague, told Reuters in the same story.

Once in Canada, Esseghaier became increasingly devout and increasingly erratic. He grew out his beard for the first time. He began praying regularly and, according to what fellow students and members of the Muslim community told police, started veering toward extremism. He harangued one female colleague in 2012 about what she wore and how she behaved. He reproached a male colleague for kissing a girl on the cheek. He told a third he supported “jihad by sending money to countries that had jihad.”

At the same time, Esseghaier’s personal life was deteriorating. One former roommate told police Esseghaier would spend three to four hours at a time in the bathroom and woke up the neighbours regularly at 3 a.m. with his yelling and prayers. A colleague who shared a lab with him for 20 months said “he looked like a homeless person, smelled, slept in his clothes and was in the washroom for two hours at a time,” according to an interview summary published in Ramshaw’s report.

[. . .]

After his arrest, in 2013, news reports focused on Esseghaier’s religious fervour. He demanded to be tried by Qur’anic law and gave multiple interviews denouncing Canada’s presence in Afghanistan and refusing to deny the charges against him. He played, in other words, the perfect part of the Muslim extremist, bent, by fierce ideology, on killing Canadians.

But in her report, Ramshaw suggested an alternative narrative. Esseghaier’s descent into religious extremism, she wrote, likely coincided with the onset of his mental illness. In fact, the two may have been inextricably linked.