The Wagmatcook band council and the family of a First Nations man shot to death by a Mountie on a Cape Breton reserve last year want to know why RCMP officers were part of a team investigating the death.

"[This is] a much more egregious violation of basic investigative techniques," Gary Richards, the lawyer representing the Wagmatcook band council said Monday, upon learning that the RCMP were part of a team investigating John Simon's death.

Simon, 44, died after he was shot three times by an RCMP officer on the Wagmatcook reserve on Dec. 2, 2008. Simon's family and police have both said Simon was drunk and suicidal at the time the officer entered his home and fired his service weapon.

The Halifax Regional Police integrated critical incident team, along with the RCMP’s Northeast Nova major crime section, spent a year looking at the events of that night. Their report determined the officer acted in self-defence.

Richards said the band council and Simon's family were shocked to learn that the RCMP helped investigate one of its own officers.

"There's already been a great concern, and one expressed in fact by Paul Kennedy, the outgoing complaints officer for the RCMP, about police forces investigating police forces," he said.

Kennedy, chairman of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, criticized the force for investigating its own officers in the death of Robert Dziekanski on Oct. 14, 2007. RCMP officers had used a Taser multiple times to subdue him at Vancouver International Airport.

An RCMP spokesman said the RCMP officers involved in the Simon investigation worked under the guidance of the team leader from the Halifax Regional Police.

The band council renewed its call for a public inquiry into Simon's death.

The RCMP said that Canada's privacy laws prevent them from releasing the report into Simon's death, but Simon's daughter, Charlene Isadore, doesn't accept that.

"We're going to fight, we're going to do whatever we can. We're going to talk to the lawyer; we're going to fight this as much as we can," she said.