[5][6] Founded sometime in the early 1960s, the FLQ conducted a number of attacks between 1963 and 1970,[7][8] which totaled over 160 violent incidents and killed eight people and injured many more.

[8][9] These attacks culminated with the Montreal Stock Exchange bombing in 1969 and the October Crisis in 1970, the latter beginning with the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner James Cross.

It gained the support of many left-leaning students, teachers and academics up to 1970, who engaged in public strikes in solidarity with FLQ during the October Crisis.

The KGB, which had established contact with the FLQ before 1970, later forged documents to portray them as a CIA false flag operation, a story that gained limited traction among academic sources before declassified Soviet archives revealed the ruse.

FLQ members Normand Roy and Michel Lambert received guerrilla training from the Palestine Liberation Organization in Jordan.

Some of their more notable crimes include bombing a railway (by which then–Prime Minister of Canada John Diefenbaker had arranged to travel within the week).

In 1963, Gabriel Hudon and Raymond Villeneuve were sentenced to 12 years in prison after their bomb killed William V. O'Neill, a furnaceman at Montreal's Canadian Army Recruiting Centre.

[25] A group of six individuals, two of whom were brothers of FLQ members arrested in 1963 (Robert Hudon and Jean Gagnon), commenced a series of crimes in Quebec over a period between 26 September 1963 and 9 April 1964.

A botched gun warehouse robbery on 29 August 1964 resulted in two deaths, the company's vice-president Leslie McWilliams and gunsmith Alfred Pinisch.

Cyr Delisle, Gilles Brunet, Marcel Tardif, François Schirm [fr] (a French Foreign Legion veteran), and Edmond Guenette, the five members arrested in connection with the deaths of MacWilliams and Pinisch,[26] workers at the store, were sentenced to life in prison.

This new group robbed a New Democratic Party office and a radio station for supplies, many of which were used to write La Cognée, the revolutionary paper published by the FLQ during the many years of activity.

On 13 February 1969, the FLQ set off a powerful bomb that ripped through the Montreal Stock Exchange causing massive destruction and seriously injuring 27 people.

This failed riot led to Mario Bachand leaving Canada, and another group of FLQ forming, which would become responsible for the October Crisis.

On 5 May 1969, FLQ members Jean-Pierre Charette and Alain Alard, who had previously fled from Canada to the U.S., hijacked a National Airlines Boeing 727 in New York, and diverted it to Cuba.

[31][32][33][34][35] On 5 October 1970, members of the FLQ's Liberation Cell kidnapped James Richard Cross, the British Trade Commissioner, as he was leaving his home for work.

Consequently, a general strike involving students, teachers and professors resulted in the closure of most French-language secondary and post-secondary academic institutions.

On 17 October, callers to a radio station announced that Laporte had been murdered and divulged the location of a map which led to the discovery of his body.

Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, in his statement to the press during the October Crisis, admitted that the radicalism occurring in Quebec at this time had bred out of social unease due to imperfect legislation.

"The government has pledged that it will introduce legislation which deals not only with the symptoms but with the social causes which often underlie or serve as an excuse for crime and disorder."

However, despite this admission, Trudeau declared in his statement to the press that in order to deal with the unruly radicals or "revolutionaries," the federal government would invoke the War Measures Act, the first time the country used these powers during peacetime.

His release was negotiated and on 3 December 1970, five of the FLQ members were granted their request for safe passage to Cuba by the Government of Canada after approval by Fidel Castro.

It helped sway public opinion towards more conventional forms of political participation and drove up popular support for the Parti Québécois (PQ).

In justifying his decision he described the FLQ as a "shock group" whose continued activities would only play into the hands of the forces of repression against which they were no match.