There are many concerns about how police dealt with an Inuit woman who went missing for a week after she came to Montreal for surgery.

Mina Iquasiak Aculiak was found Thursday by an off-duty police officer, almost one week after the 48-year-old was picked up and released by police.

Aculiak had been staying at the Gingras-Lindsay Rehabilitation Institute on Darlington Ave. in Cote-des-Neiges as she recovered from injuries she suffered following an altercation with police in April.

On Friday, she returned to the centre and, at the request of its administrators, was arrested by police because she was intoxicated.

Police then took her to a police station in Saint-Laurent and when she sobered up around midnight, she was released, given a bus ticket, and told to make her own way back to the physical therapy centre, despite her speaking no French and very little English. She still had a catheter in her arm.

Nobody then saw her until Thursday morning, when the officer located her at Cremazie Blvd. and Bloomfield Ave.

The incident has many people upset.

Nakuset, the director of the Native Women's Shelter in Montreal, is appalled that police sent someone away with obvious physical injuries and a lack of ability to speak the local language.

"The fact that they chose to leave a woman that still has a catheter in her arm, in the streets at midnight, is horrific. It doesn't make sense at all. I don't understand how they could do such a thing," said Nakuset.

She said if police had contacted her group, "we would have taken her in a second."

"This could have been avoided," said Nakuset, and instead police and the public now have to find a woman with severe injuries who has gone missing.

Police Inspector André Durocher said the force will investigate why Aculiak was left to make her own way home.

"If something was improper of course we're going to correct it," said Durocher. "Is it a weakness in the procedure? Was the procedure followed, not followed? Those are the type of things that we need to validate before we make any further comments," he said.

Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante said this is a good time for review.

“I think it's a good opt for them to question and to revise some of those procedures around those cases, because it happens,” she said.

Aculiak came to Montreal for surgery after being hit by a police car on April 4.

According to APTN, Aculiak was running from police in the village of Umiujaq after shoplifting some knives when officers hit her with their car.

The impact fractured six of her vertebrae, broke several ribs and her left arm, and punctured her lung, kidney, and liver.

Quebec's independent police inquiry task force, the BEI, launched an investigation two months after learning of the incident. According to the initial report, Kativik police believed the woman was going to hurt someone with the knives, and that she suffered a broken arm when hit by a police car.

It was only when La Presse reported on the full extent of Aculiak's injuries that the BEI went to Umiujaq to begin a thorough investigation.