The young man killed by police on Monday after he ran over two Canadian soldiers with his car in a Quebec was known to authorities as a suspected radical, officials said.
One of the two soldiers is in critical condition in a hospital in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, about 40km southeast of Montreal, while the other was not as seriously injured, officials have said.
The incident occurred shortly before noon, when a car smashed into the two soldiers in a supermarket parking lot before fleeing with police in pursuit.
A few kilometers away, the driver lost control of his car and flipped into a ditch. A witness said the driver was holding a knife and headed toward police after he extricated himself from his vehicle.
Police shot multiple times at the 25-year-old suspect, who later died.
Quebec police could not confirm whether the man was armed and said only that shots had been fired.
The suspect was known to “federal authorities including our Integrated National Security Investigations team in Montreal,” who “were concerned that he had become radicalized,” federal police said in a statement.
The investigation into the incident is ongoing, the statement said, adding that federal police are working with law enforcement partners “to ensure all avenues of investigation are pursued.”
Quebec police said the “terrorist thesis [is] being considered by investigators,” but did not provide further details. They did not specify any links between the suspect and any outlawed groups. Police searched the man’s home and interviewed his contacts on Monday night.
The incident drew political attention when Conservative Party lawmaker Randy Hoback referred to “unconfirmed reports of a possible terror attack” in a question to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the House of Commons.
A neighbor of the suspect told a TV station he had seen changes in the man’s behavior in recent years.
“There was sort of a change in the last year or two,” the neighbor said, adding that: “He had converted to Islam.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema