OTTAWA: Six people from Sri Lanka, including a mother and four young children, were killed in a knife attack in the Canadian capital of Ottawa late Wednesday, police said Thursday, shaking a country where mass killings are rare. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was horrified by what he called a “terrible tragedy.”
The father of the family, who is in hospital, was also injured in the attack. Police said Febrio De-Zoysa, a 19-year-old student from Sri Lanka, was arrested and charged with six counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. De-Zoys knew the family and lived in the house, they said.
The victims were a 35-year-old woman and her children aged seven, four, two, and two months, as well as a 40-year-old man who was an acquaintance of the family. “This was a senseless act of violence against innocent people,” Ottawa Police Chief Eric Stubbs said at a televised news conference.
Police said they had no prior dealings with the suspect or his family. Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe said in a social media post that it was “one of the most shocking incidents of violence in our city’s history.” In Ottawa, which has a population of one million, fourteen were murdered in 2023 and 15 in 2022.
Wednesday’s victims were found in a house in the southwest suburb of Barrhaven. Police arrived at the scene shortly before 11 pm on Wednesday following emergency calls. Mass killings are not common in Canada. In December 2022, a man shot five people in suburban Toronto before being shot by police.
In September of that year, a man stabbed and killed eleven people in the western province of Saskatchewan. He died of a cocaine overdose shortly after his arrest.