Face of Nation International : That’s how long Nova Scotia RCMP had between the time provincial officials offered to help send an emergency alert to every Nova Scotian’s phone about a rogue gunman on the loose and the time the attacker was killed. During that time, officers at RCMP headquarters in Dartmouth were deliberating over several details, including how the message should be worded.
“At 10:15 a.m., Nova Scotia Provincial Emergency Management officials contacted the RCMP to offer the use of the public emergency alerting system,” Nova Scotia RCMP Chief Superintendent Chris Leather said at a news conference Wednesday. “So in that hour and a bit, in that amount of consultation, is when the subject was killed at 11:26 a.m.” An emergency alert was never sent.
The gap in time is one of several outstanding questions about how the hours-long massacre unfolded and how RCMP responded to the rampage that left 22 people dead. Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil said Wednesday that the Emergency Management Office (EMO) reached out to the RCMP “a number of times” about issuing an emergency alert Sunday morning.
“That’s the protocol in place when it comes to EMO … the lead agency is the one that has to put the message together. We would not go from what’s happening by Twitter — we would need the lead agency to actually craft the message so that we could put that out, and no message was received even though EMO had reached out a number of times throughout the morning to the RCMP.”
New details are also emerging about the timeline of the RCMP’s tweets. Sometime between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Sunday, police officers learned from a witness that the gunman, identified as 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman, was in possession of an authentic police uniform and lookalike RCMP cruiser. It wasn’t until at least two hours and twenty minutes later, at 10:21 a.m., that police issued a tweet warning the public that the suspect may be disguised as a police officer. (Source: CTV News – Canada)
