What we know about Toronto van attack suspect Alek Minassian – By Kim Hjelmgaard (usatoday.com) / April 24 2018
Canadian police were trying to establish Tuesday why a driver plowed a rented van along a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 people and injuring 15, in what eyewitness accounts and surveillance video appeared to indicate was a deliberate attack.
Investigators said that suspect Alek Minassian, 25, was not previously known to authorities, that no motive had yet emerged, but that his actions seemed deliberate.
Minassian was expected to appear in court on Tuesday morning in connection with what is the worst mass killing in Canada in three decades. In 1989, Marc Lepine killed 14 women at an engineering school in Montreal before taking his own life.
Minassian repeatedly mounted the sidewalk with a white Ryder van and slammed into pedestrians along a stretch of Toronto’s busy Yonge Street on Monday. He was arrested near the scene after a brief, but tense, confrontation with police officers.
“The incident definitely looked deliberate,” Police Chief Mark Saunders told reporters at a late-night news conference. Saunders said Minassian lives in Richmond Hill, a suburb of Toronto. An online social media profile described him as a college student.
Police would comment on a possible motive, but played down a possible connection to terrorism at time when Toronto this week is hosting Group of Seven foreign and security ministers for a summit. “Based on what we have there’s nothing that has it to compromise the national security at this time,” Saunders said.
Ralph Goodale, Canada’s public safety minister, said there was no information warranting a change to the nation’s terror threat level — set at “medium” — and that Monday’s incident does “not appear to be connected in any way to national security.”
Canada’s Global and Mail newspaper described Minassian as a man with no known religious or political affiliations, strong views or a history or penchant for violence. The newspaper spoke to his former high school and Seneca College classmates.
The incident conjured the memory of recent mass-casualty events where someone intentionally drove a vehicle into a crowd. Such attacks have been increasingly used by terrorists, but in other instances, the driver acted out of mental illness or simple rage.
