Canada: Mourners hold vigil at scene of Quebec mosque attack

Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder.

The attack happened when the people were praying in a Quebec Mosque, media reports said.

"What happened has really shocked me. I never expect such a thing in Quebec City," Salah Abdullah, a Laval University doctoral student, said in an interview with CBC News.

"I never lock the door of my house. It's really very safe. It reminds me of when I lived in Yemen — always we had bombings everywhere. I said to myself today, why is this culture following me everywhere?"

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the vigil Monday night only a few steps away from the mosque. "The community lived through an experience that no community should ever have to cope with: indescribable violence targeted at individuals that had met in friendship and in faith," he said, CBCNews reports said.

Abdullah was a regular parishioner at the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec and came to the scene of the crime like many other Quebecers, to engage in a process of collective mourning.

The vigil was very quiet broken only by a few audible sounds of sobbing from the group of mourners.

According to the Quebec coroner's office, the victims were: Azzeddine Soufiane, 57; Khaled Belkacemi, 60; Aboubaker Thabti, 44; Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42; Ibrahima Barry, 39; Abdelkrim Hassane, 41.

"I want for the media to personify the dead people, each one. It's a family, a partner, part of a family, a father, and I want this humanity to be in your media," Mohamed Labidi, the former president of the mosque, said at an emotional press conference edged by Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard and Régis Labeaume, Quebec's mayor, ahead of the vigil, CBCNews reports said.

(Reported by Asha Bajaj)