Father waits to see body in cellphone death case

Sultan Sultan says he’ll find out Monday if a body pulled from an Ottawa River is his son — the target of a nationwide search after a London teenager was gunned down trying to retrieve his lost cellphone.

“(Police) will know the results Monday,” Sultan told the London Free Press over the weekend, as he braced himself to fly to Ottawa where he expects he will be asked to identify the body.

Police will compare the teeth of the man pulled from the Rideau River with dental records at London’s Victoria Hospital, where Muhab Sultanaly Sultan sought care in 2012, his father said.

“This has been a nightmare. We can’t sleep, we can’t do anything in life until we see what is going on,” Sultan Sultan said.

Muhab Sultanaly Sultan, 23, of Calgary, is wanted by London police on suspicion of second-degree murder in the June 14 shooting death of 18-year-old Jeremy Cook, who’d been trying to get back a cellphone he’d left in a taxi.

The case made international headlines, because the former Brampton, Ont., teenager used an app to track down his phone, then went to get it and was shot.

Saturday, after a prolonged search, Ottawa police pulled a body from the Rideau River after someone reported seeing it.

Police have refused to estimate the age of the dead man.

Ottawa police had been probing the possibility a man who tried to swim across the Rideau River, following a traffic stop last Wednesday that led to a pursuit of a vehicle, was the suspect in the London shooting. One officer was struck by the vehicle and suffered minor injuries.

Police pursued the vehicle and took a male passenger into custody, but the driver escaped into a nearby wooded area. Hours later, after efforts to track the man with a dog failed, police were alerted about a man trying to swim across the river.

“As the officers got closer to the suspect,” police said at the time, “he went under the water” and had yet to be found.

That makes little sense to Sultan Sultan, who says his son was a strong swimmer who took lessons at a YMCA and the aquatic centre in London. “He wanted to be a lifeguard,” Sultan said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

The passenger involved in the Ottawa incident isn’t related to the London investigation into Cook’s killing, London Const. Ken Steeves said.