Biodun Iginla, BBC News

Biodun Iginla, BBC News
Showing posts with label Alek Minassian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alek Minassian. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

BREAKING AND UPDATE: Factbox: Canada attack suspect linked to celibates angry at women

April 25, 2018 01H:30  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME
An Ontario man accused of using a rented van as a weapon in Canada’s deadliest mass murder in decades declared himself to be a soldier in the “incel” rebellion, a term referring to a loose social media movement of men who blame women for their celibacy.
Alek Minassian, 25, of the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill, was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder in Tuesday’s driving rampage.
Canadian authorities have declined to say whether anger toward women motivated the attack. The majority of the victims were women, ranging in age from their mid-20s to early 80s.
Before the attack, Minassian expressed his support for incel, short for “involuntary celibate,” on a Facebook account believed to be his. The account was taken down after the rampage.
The following are some facts about incel:
- On a Facebook account linked to Minassian, a posting praised Elliot Rodger a 22-year-old who killed six people in 2014 in California and who posted YouTube videos saying he was motivated by rage against women. Minassian’s Facebook posting read in part: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun.”
- Rodger had posted three videos on YouTube entitled “Spring break sucks when you’re lonely,” “My reaction to seeing a couple at the beach ... envy,” and “Retribution.” In the clips he said he was determined to punish women who had rejected him.
- Shortly after the 2014 murders, a 23-year-old University of Washington student, Keshav Mukund Bhide, was charged in federal court with making threatening comments over the internet, including pledging to kill women and praising Rodger.
- Reddit, which hosts online chatrooms and bulletin boards, banned a group with 40,000 members called r/Incels in November. It said the group had violated its policy that prohibits calls for violence. Some members had lauded Rodger as a hero of the incel movement.
- r/IncelsWithoutHate, a support group created a year ago, remains active on Reddit “for all the people ... who don’t feel the same hatred that is often expressed” in the r/Incels group.
- Reddit also hosts IncelTears, a watchdog group that exposes extremist incel views.
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Toronto police eye deadly van attack suspect's 'cryptic message'

April 25, 2018  00H:35  GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME
TORONTO  - The man accused of plowing a rental van into pedestrians on a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 people, in Canada’s deadliest mass killing in decades left a “cryptic message” on social media before his attack, police said on Tuesday.
Suspect Alek Minassian, 25, was charged with 10 counts of murder and 13 counts of attempted murder in the incident, which had the hallmarks of deadly vehicle assaults by Islamic State supporters. But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there was no reason to suspect any national security connection.
Minassian kept his shaved head down during a brief court appearance in Canada’s largest city, speaking quietly with a defense lawyer and stating his name in a steady voice when asked to do so.
One possible clue to his motive emerged on Tuesday as Facebook confirmed Minassian said in a post before the incident that referenced an “incel rebellion,” a shorthand used in some online message boards for “involuntary celibacy.”

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The post also voiced admiration for a man who killed six college students before taking his own life in California in 2014.
“The accused is alleged to have posted a cryptic message on Facebook minutes before” the attack, Graham Gibson, a Toronto police detective sergeant, told a news conference.
Facebook has since deleted Minassian’s account, a representative said.
“There is absolutely no place on our platform for people who commit such horrendous acts,” she said in an email.
Trudeau called on all Canadians to stand united with Toronto as flowers and scrawled messages in multiple languages piled up at a makeshift memorial in the city’s north end, an ethnically diverse neighborhood of towering office buildings, shops, restaurants and homes.
“We cannot as Canadians choose to live in fear every single day as we go about our daily business,” Trudeau told reporters outside of parliament in Ottawa.
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The prime minister said the incident had not changed the country’s threat level or security preparations for a G7 summit in Quebec in June.
Minassian had briefly served in Canada’s armed forces in late 2017 but asked to be voluntarily released after 16 days of training, defense ministry spokeswoman Jessica Lamirande said.
He had previously attended a high school program where one classmate remembered him as “absolutely harmless.”
The suspect’s two-story red-brick home in a suburb north of Toronto was a crime scene Tuesday, taped off and surrounded by police vehicles. Officers went in and out of the house.
A mourner visits a makeshift memorial a day after a van struck multiple people along a major intersection in north Toronto, Ontario, Canada, April 24, 2018. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

SOUTH KOREANS AMONG VICTIMS

Details about the dead began to emerge on Tuesday, with a South Korean foreign ministry representative saying that two of that country’s citizens were killed and one injured in the attack. The representative spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp identified one of the victims as Anne Marie D’Amico, an employee of asset manager Invesco Canada. In a statement, Invesco confirmed that one of its employees had been killed but did not name her.
Officials said it could be days before all the victims were publicly identified.
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“We have notified families and told them that we believe tentatively that their loved ones have passed,” said Ontario Chief Coroner Dirk Huyer, citing the difficulty in identifying the dead partly due to the extent of the injuries.
The attack shook the usually peaceful streets of Toronto, a multicultural city with a population of 2.8 million. The city recorded 61 murders last year.
The drama started at lunchtime on a warm spring day, when the driver drove his vehicle into the crowds. The street was soon covered in blood, empty shoes and bodies.
Last October, eight people died in New York when a man driving a rented pickup truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a bike path. The Islamic State militant group encourages its supporters to use vehicles for attacks.
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Deadly Toronto van massacre: What we know


by Rochelle van Amber and Biodun Iginla, France24, Toronto


    © AFP | Police stand near one of the bodies on the street after a man drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto killing at least 10 and injuring 15

    TORONTO (CANADA) - 
    The suspect in a driving rampage that left 10 dead and 15 injured in Toronto -- Canada's biggest city -- was charged with murder and attempted murder on Tuesday.
    Alek Minassian, 25, made a brief court appearance to hear the charges against him.
    Here are the main facts known so far in what the government is calling a deliberate attack:
    - The carnage -
    Just before 1:30 pm (1730 GMT) Monday, police received an emergency call reporting pedestrians struck by a vehicle on busy Yonge Street in the center of Toronto.
    A white rented van sped along that street and up onto the sidewalk at lunchtime for about half a mile (one kilometer), said the city's police chief Mark Saunders.
    About 20 minutes later, the suspect was arrested near where the van had been left, its front bumper smashed in.
    Police said 10 pedestrians were killed and 15 others injured, some of them in critical condition.
    Several of the victims were identified in court documents. Two South Korean nationals were among the dead.
    - The driver -
    Police identified the van driver as Minassian, from a Toronto suburb.
    The suspect lived with his father and attended a Toronto vocational school. His classmates described him to local media as withdrawn and a bit awkward.
    At the time of his arrest, he was behaving strangely and holding some kind of object in his left hand as police squared off with him, according to photos seen on social media.
    Police handcuffed the man as he lay on the ground.
    In his first brief court appearance, Minassian, who has an imposing physical build and a shaved head, wore a white police jumpsuit.
    - The motive: 'deliberate' but why? -
    Police said they hoped their interrogation of Minassian would reveal his motive.
    They said he had no police record, while Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale downplayed a theory of a terror attack such as those carried out by extremists in London, Nice and other major cities.
    "The actions definitely looked deliberate," Saunders told journalists, adding that the driver jumped up onto the sidewalk as well as driving erratically on the street.
    "So far, there is no discernable connection to national security," Goodale said Tuesday.
    Toronto Mayor John Tory, meanwhile, said at the start of a city council meeting on Tuesday: "People are scared, they are unsure of what happened or why, and they are uncertain about what they should do.
    "We do not have all of the answers, the police and others do not have all of the answer about what happened yesterday and they may not come for some time."

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