[Breaking news update, published at 11 a.m. ET]
A man accused of slashing at least one Canadian military member with a knife at a Toronto recruiting center Monday allegedly said after the assault that “Allah told me to do this,” Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders said Tuesday.
“‘Allah told me to do this. Allah told me to come here and kill people,'” Saunders said, quoting suspect Ayanie Hassan Ali.
Ali, 27, is accused of injuring two Canadian military members — slashing at least one with a knife — at a recruitment center Monday afternoon in a federal building in Toronto, Saunders said.
Ali faces charges including one count of attempted murder, two counts of assault with a weapon and one count of aggravated assault, Saunders said. He is due in court at 2 p.m. ET Tuesday.
Despite what Ali is alleged to have said, investigators still are trying to determine whether the attack was terrorism-related, Saunders said.
“We’re certainly looking into it,” Saunders said. Investigators have no information that Ali was working with any other person or organization, Saunders said.
Ali was born in Montreal and has lived in Toronto since 2011, Saunders said.
[Original story, published at 8:50 a.m. ET]
A man stabbed two members of the Canadian armed forces Monday at a military recruiting center in Toronto before being taken into custody, police said.
The two victims sustained injuries that were not life-threatening, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders told reporters.
Authorities have not released the identity of the 27-year-old suspect. But comments he allegedly made before the police’s arrival have sparked concern, Saunders told reporters.
“This has caused us to look a little bit better at the motive behind this attack,” he said.
Asked whether the attack could be tied to terrorist activity, the police chief said authorities are still investigating.
“That is one of the angles that we are strongly looking at,” he said. “We don’t have a clear understanding of what the motivation is.”
The “unprovoked attack,” Saunders said, began around 3:30 p.m. Monday when a man walked into the recruiting center, pulled out a knife and stabbed a person behind the counter who was in full uniform.
The man then walked toward the rear of the center, where other employees in uniform were. Another man was stabbed as troops subdued the suspect, according to the police chief.
Saunders declined to comment on what the suspect said.
“Tomorrow I’ll have a better understanding of exactly what was said and a much bigger picture of what this whole thing was caused by,” he said.
The suspect is due to appear in court at 2 p.m. ET Tuesday, police said. Information on what charges would be filed wasn’t immediately available.
Toronto Mayor John Tory said his office is monitoring the situation.
In October 2014, a Canadian soldier was gunned down while standing guard at a war memorial in the capital of Ottawa.
Officials alleged the gunman, who was killed when he stormed into Parliament shortly afterward, had jihadist ties.
Two days before, a “radicalized” convert to Islam drove into two members of the Canadian armed forces who had been walking in a strip mall parking lot in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, killing one of them, Canadian authorities said.
That driver, who police later shot to death, had expressed support online for the Islamist terror group ISIS, and may have been responding to an ISIS spokesman’s call to arms, according to the Institute for the Study of War.