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A veteran Ottawa constable will lose 10 days’ pay over the gunpoint arrest of an innocent woman who was travelling home with her infant daughter when she was wrongfully detained.

Const. Jerome Belanger, a 14-year veteran of the Ottawa Police Service, pleaded guilty to misconduct after he employed “unlawful or unnecessary exercise of authority” when he arrested the woman, who he had wrongfully suspected was involved in a stabbing on Oct. 12, 2014.

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Supt. Uday Jaswal levied the penalty, docking 10 days’ pay, at a disciplinary hearing Monday. The officer has since apologized to the woman, a mother from Winnipeg, who was not named publicly.

The woman, identified in committee documents by her initials, S.N., was in a taxi on her way to the Ottawa International Airport in 2014 after visiting family in Ottawa with her 10-month-old daughter, when the cab was pulled over.

She was told at gunpoint to step out of the car and to kneel on the ground with her hands behind her head, arrested, handcuffed and ordered into the back of a cruiser. Belanger read her rights while her infant daughter remained in the taxi, according to evidence filed in the hearing.