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But hidden in plain sight in the photo is the concrete strength of the National War Memorial. The photo was taken by a tourist as the gunman embarked on his shooting spree, coming around the west side of the monument from the rear.

Ottawa police seized the camera, and it is believed an Ottawa police officer took a picture of that picture with a cell phone. Within hours, every Ottawa police officer had a copy of that photograph in their email inboxes.

In a blog post, French-Canadian journalist William Reymond claims he first saw the photo at about 2 p.m. He writes that a source notified him that an alleged photo of the gunman had been posted by an anonymous account in response to a tweet on the Ottawa police Twitter account. Shortly after Reymond took a screenshot of the photo, it was deleted, he said.

Over the course of the next two hours, Reymond spoke to numerous sources in an attempt to verify the authenticity of the photo. At 4.16 p.m., he posted the photo on the @Breaking3zero account and announced that a source had told him “it looks like the shooter.”

In the lower right corner of the photo what appears to be the rectangular zoom feature of the Blackberry operating system.

The photo came to general awareness after Twitter user @ArmedResearch — apparently run by a military historian — tweeted the photo at 4:23 p.m., nearly seven hours after the first shot was fired, saying it had been found on an ISIS-related account. The french-language account @V_IMS took the photo from @Breaking3zero, according to Reymond.