Court sees surveillance videos in trial of man accused of ordering hit

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The trial of a businessman from Joliette accused of ordering two men to shoot a lawyer at his home four years ago is underway at the Longueuil courthouse.

Jean-François Malo, 45, faces a series of charges, including attempted murder, in a trial that is expected to last four weeks. The Crown’s theory of the case is that Malo, a real-estate developer, asked the two men — Cheikh Ahmed Tidiane Ndiaye, of Longueuil, and Daouda Dieng, of Brossard — to shoot Nicholas Daudelin, a lawyer with Mouvements Desjardins.

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On March 26, 2020, Daudelin’s leg was struck by a bullet inside his home in Mont-St-Hilaire as shots were fired through his front door after he refused to open it for a stranger.

At the time of the shooting, Malo was involved in a series of civil court cases brought against him by Desjardins assurances générales. A few days before the shooting, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled in favour of Desjardins’s insurance company.

On Nov. 3, 2022, in a separate trial, Ndiaye and Dieng were found guilty of discharging a firearm with the intent to wound a person and assault with a weapon. They were acquitted of attempted murder in the same case. On May 15, 2023, Ndiaye was sentenced to a nine-year prison term while Dieng was sentenced to 10 years.

Malo’s trial began on Monday and on Tuesday Quebec Court Judge Christian Jarry was shown a series of videos recorded by surveillance cameras that showed Ndiaye and Dieng arriving at and leaving Daudelin’s home.

David Godbout, the Sûreté du Québec investigator who arrested Ndiaye, provided the judge with a narration of what is seen in the videos.

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The next witness to testify, Yves Grondin, a crime scene technician with an expertise in footprints and tire tracks, said he was called in to record traces of the paths Ndiaye and Dieng took outside Daudelin’s house. While answering questions from prosecutor Tian Meng, Grondin said that when he arrived he realized he was facing “a race against time” because the footprints were left in a mixture of snow and ice while the temperature that night was 6 C and it was raining.

After recording a series of prints left by shoes at the crime scene, Grondin was asked by a SQ investigator, five months later, to compare what he recorded on the day of the shooting to two pairs of shoes that had been seized as part of the investigation into Ndiaye and Dieng. Grondin will resume his testimony on Wednesday.

Earlier in the day Tuesday, Malo was granted permission to follow the trial remotely through a videoconference from his home in Joliette for a couple of days per week. His lawyer, Karl Emmanuel Harrison, told the judge that it takes Malo about three hours per trip to and from the Longueuil courthouse because of the ongoing construction on the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Tunnel.

pcherry@postmedia.com

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