DEADLIEST MASS SLAYINGS IN RECENT CANADIAN HISTORY
Here are some of the deadliest mass murders in recent Canadian history:
• April 23, 2018: A man drives a white van for about a mile along a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 people and seriously injuring at least 13 others. Police arrest suspect Alek Minassian. The motive remains unclear.
• Jan. 29, 2017: Six people are killed and eight are injured when a man goes on a shooting rampage at a Quebec City mosque. University student Alexandre Bissonnette, who had taken far-right political positions on social media, pleads guilty.
• June 4, 2015: A man uses a semiautomatic rifle to fatally shoot three Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and wound two others in Moncton, N.B. It’s the deadliest attack on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police since four officers were killed by a gunman in Alberta in 2005. That attack remains the deadliest on Canadian police officers in 120 years.
• Dec. 29, 2014: In the worst mass shooting in Edmonton, a man suspected of domestic violence shoots and kills six adults and two young children in two different homes before killing himself in a restaurant where he worked.
• April 5, 1996: Angered by his wife’s divorce action, Rajwar Gakhal kills her and eight other members of her family in Vernon, B.C., before shooting himself.
• Sept. 18, 1992: A bomb kills nine strike-breaking workers at the Giant Yellowknife gold mine in the Northwest Territories.
• Dec. 6, 1989: A man with a semiautomatic rifle storms into an engineering classroom at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, asks men to leave and then kills 14 women before turning the gun on himself. Gunman Marc Lepine says he was “fighting against feminists” he blamed for his troubles.
• Sept. 1, 1972: An arson attack on a downtown Montreal night club kills 37 people and injures 64. Gasoline was spread on the stairway of Blue Bird Cafe and then ignited. Most of the deaths occurred in the Wagon Wheel country-western bar upstairs. Three young men from Montreal who had earlier been denied entry for drunkenness were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.