Six people from Sri Lanka, including a mother and four young children, were knifed to death in the Canadian capital Ottawa late on Wednesday, police said on Thursday, rocking a country where mass murders are rare.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was horrified by what he called a “terrible tragedy”. The father of the family was also wounded in the attack and is in hospital.
Police said Febrio De-Zoysa, a 19-year-old male student from Sri Lanka, had been arrested and charged with six counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder. De-Zoysa knew the family and had been living in the house, they said.
The victims killed 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 perpetrated on purely innocent people,” Ottawa police chief Eric Stubbs told a televised news conference. Police said they had had no previous dealings with the suspect or the family.
Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, in a social media post, said it was “one of the most shocking incidents of violence in our city’s history”.
Ottawa, which has a population of one million, saw 14 murders in 2023 and 15 in 2022.
Wednesday’s victims were found inside a house in the southwestern suburb of Barrhaven. Police arrived on the scene following emergency calls shortly before 11pm on Wednesday.
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Don Perera, a neighbour, said he met the family that lived in the home last fall at a Halloween party at the nearby Catholic junior school. He said the father was from Sri Lanka.
Shanti Ramesh, who lives across the street, was alerted to a commotion late Wednesday. From her balcony, she saw a man sitting on the driveway of the home and yelling before two police officers arrived and carried him away.
Mass killings in Canada are infrequent. In December 2022, a man shot five people in a Toronto suburb before being gunned down by police.
In September that year, a man stabbed and killed 11 people in the western province of Saskatchewan. He died of a cocaine overdose shortly after being arrested.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
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