A ‘terrorist attack’ has claimed the lives of four members of a Canadian Muslim family after a pickup truck jumped the curb and ran them over.
Canadian police said the Muslim family which lives in London, Ontario was killed in an anti-Muslim hate crime.
The suspected attacker, 20-year-old Nathaniel Veltman, hit five members of the family with his pickup truck and sped off.
He was later arrested in a mall parking lot, wearing a body-armor-type vest, according to police.
He is due in court on Thursday to face four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
The local police chief, Stephen Williams, told reporters that the act was motivated by hate.
“The victims of this horrific incident were targeted. We believe the victims were targeted because of their Islamic faith”
TERRORIST ATTACK
Among those killed were a 15-year-old girl, both of her parents, and her grandmother.
Her 9-year-old brother is in the hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to redouble efforts to fight far-right groups.
“This was a terrorist attack, motivated by hatred, in the heart of one of our communities,” Trudeau said in the House of Commons after observing a moment of silence. “We’ll continue to fight hate online and off-line… (including) taking more action to dismantle far-right hate groups like we did with the Proud Boys by adding them to Canada’s terror listing.”
He had earlier tweeted, “Islamophobia has no place in any of our communities. This hate is insidious and despicable and it must stop.”
London has a large Muslim community and Arabic is the city’s second-most-spoken language after English.
‘WORST MASS MURDER’
Sunday’s killings are the worst attack against Canadian Muslims since the Quebec City mosque shooting in 2017.
London Mayor Ed Holder called it the worst mass murder in his city’s history.
“Muslims wonder, how many more lives will it take, how many families will be mowed – mowed – down in the streets, how many more families will be killed before we do something?” opposition New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, the first person from an ethnic minority to lead a major Canadian political party.
In February, Canada designated the far-right Proud Boys group a terrorist entity, saying it posed an active security threat after the January U.S. Capitol attack in Washington.
Although the group has never mounted an attack in Canada, officials said domestic intelligence forces have become increasingly worried about it.
An anti-Islam rally was held in London in 2017 that was organized by a group called the Patriots of Canada Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA), with counter-protesters greatly outnumbering the anti-Muslim demonstrators, according to media reports at the time.
