Veltman gets life in prison for London attack

A man who killed four members of a Muslim family in London, Ont., has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, as a judge ruled that the actions of the “admitted white nationalist” amounted to terrorism.

Nathaniel Veltman has also been sentenced to a concurrent life sentence for the attempted murder of a boy who survived the 2021 attack.

Veltman, 23, was found guilty in November of four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder for hitting the Afzaal family with his truck while they were out for a walk.

Justice Renee Pomerance, who presided over the trial, delivered her sentencing decision to a packed London courtroom on Thursday morning.

“The offender set out to disrupt the most basic of all human rights, the right to live life with a sense of peace and security,” she said.

“The brutality of the crime, its random character, the hatred that fueled that and the consequences ... calls for the imposition of the strictest penalty known to Canadian law.”

The case was the first time Canada’s terrorism laws were put before a jury in a first-degree murder trial.

In delivering her sentencing decision, Pomerance ruled that Veltman’s actions constituted terrorism.

“The offender did not know the victims. He had never met them. He killed them because they were Muslim,” she said.

“It is an inescapable conclusion that the offender committed a terrorist act. One might go so far as to characterize this as a textbook example of terrorist motive and intent.”

Members of the Afzaal family were seen crying and nodding as Pomerance made her findings and some later hugged each other after the judge left the courtroom.

Veltman was convicted of killing 46-year-old Salman Afzaal; his 44-year-old wife, Madiha Salman; their 15-year-old daughter, Yumna; and her 74-yearold grandmother, Talat Afzaal. The couple’s nineyear-old son was seriously hurt but survived.

Prosecutors had argued Veltman was a white supremacist with a plan to commit violence, while the defence argued his actions shouldn’t be considered terrorism because he kept his beliefs to himself.

Pomerance said Veltman was “a voracious consumer of extremist right wing internet content” who became inspired by other mass killers.

She described him as believing “in the superiority of the white race, and the related aspiration for an all white society.”

“In his statement to police, the offender made it clear that he wanted the world to know what he had done and why he had done it. This was part of a plan,” the judge said.

“He wanted it to intimidate the Muslim community. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of other mass killers, and he wanted to inspire others to commit murderous acts.”

During the trial, Veltman testified he had been considering using his pickup truck to carry out an attack and felt an “urge” to hit the Afzaal family after seeing them walking on a sidewalk. He said he knew they were Muslims from the clothes they were wearing and he noticed the man in the group had a beard.

The jury also watched video of Veltman telling a detective his attack had been motivated by white nationalist beliefs, and heard he wrote a manifesto where he described himself as a white supremacist in the weeks before the attack.

MOSCOW — The mother of Russia’s top opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Thursday that she has seen her son’s body and that she is resisting strong pressure by authorities to agree to a secret burial outside the public eye.

Speaking in a video statement from the Arctic city of Salekhard, Lyudmila Navalnaya said investigators have allowed her to see her son’s body in the city morgue. She said she reaffirmed the demand to give Navalny’s body to her and protested what she described as authorities trying to force her to agree to a secret burial.

“They are blackmailing me, they are setting conditions where, when and how my son should be buried,” she said. “They want it to do it secretly without a mourning ceremony.”

Navalny’s mother has filed a lawsuit at a court in Salekhard contesting officials’ refusal to release her son’s body. A closed-door hearing has been scheduled for March 4. On Tuesday, she appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to release her son’s remains so that she could bury him with dignity.

Navalny’s death has deprived the Russian opposition of its best-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that is all but certain to give Putin another six years in power. Many Russians had seen Navalny as a rare hope for political change amid Putin’s unrelenting crackdown on the opposition.

Since Navalny’s death, about 400 people have been detained across Russia as they tried to pay tribute to him with flowers and candles, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors political arrests. Authorities cordoned off some of the memorials to victims of Soviet repression across the country that were being used as sites to leave makeshift tributes to Navalny. Police removed the flowers at night, but more keep appearing.

Earlier Thursday, imprisoned opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza urged Russians not to give up after Navalny ‘s death, and he alleged a state-backed hit squad was taking out the Kremlin’s political opponents, according to a video posted to social media.

A British-Russian citizen, Kara-Murza is serving a 25-year sentence for treason at Penal Colony No. 7 in the Siberian city of Omsk. His comments came as he appeared via a video link in a court hearing over a complaint against Russia’s Investigative Committee for what he believes were two poisoning attempts against him. He alleges the committee didn’t properly investigate the attempts.

Kara-Murza is one of several opposition figures who have either been imprisoned, forced to flee the country or killed. He was convicted of criticizing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and was handed a stiff sentence as part of a crackdown against critics of the war and freedom of speech.

“We owe it ... to our fallen comrades to continue to work with even greater strength and achieve what they lived and died for,” Kara-Murza said in the video, which was shared by the Russian Sota telegram channel.

Kara-Murza says the attempts to poison him took place in 2015 and 2017. In the first, he nearly died of kidney failure, although no cause was determined. He was hospitalized with a similar illness in 2017 and put into a medically induced coma. His wife said doctors confirmed he was poisoned.

Kara-Murza’s latest hearing came after months of postponements. In January, he was moved from another prison in Siberia and placed in solitary confinement over an alleged minor infraction.

According to the video shared by Sota, Kara-Murza alleged there is a “death squad within the Federal Security Service, a group of professional killers in the service of the state, whose task is to physically eliminate political opponents of the Putin regime.”

He said investigative journalists had shown the group of FSB officers participated in his poisoning, as well as Navalny’s poisoning with a nerve agent in 2020 and the surveillance of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov before he was shot and killed in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin.

On Monday, Ilya Yashin, an opposition figure serving 8 1/2 years in prison for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine, alleged in a social media post shared on his behalf that Putin had killed Navalny.

“I have no doubt that it was Putin. He’s a war criminal,” Yashin said. “Navalny was his key opponent in Russia and was hated by the Kremlin. Putin had both motive and opportunity. I am convinced that he ordered the killing.”

“I feel a black emptiness inside,” he said, adding that he will continue to speak out even though he believes he is also in danger.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the illnesses and deaths of the opposition figures, including Navalny.

Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said Thursday on her Instagram account that she had flown to visit her 20-year-old daughter, Dasha, a student at Stanford University.

“My dear girl, I came to hug you and support you, and you sit and support me” she wrote under a photo of herself and her daughter lying on a carpet.

Describing her daughter as “strong, brave and resilient,” Navalnaya said the family would “definitely cope with everything.” She also has a 15-year-old son, Zakhar.

Russian authorities have said the cause of Navalny’s death is still unknown and have refused to release his body for two weeks as the preliminary inquest continues, his team said. It accused the government of stalling to try to hide evidence.

In a video on Monday, Yulia Navalnaya also accusing Putin of killing her husband and alleged the refusal to release his body was part of a cover-up.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations, calling them “absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state.”