Police arrested a man at gunpoint steps from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, underscoring tensions in the capital Ottawa a day after a gunman killed a soldier and rampaged through parliament.
The tense moment, captured on camera and seen by throngs of people and politicians who had gathered at the war memorial, highlighted tensions in Ottawa.
Harper and his wife were laying a wreath at the National War Memorial to commemorate the killing of a Canadian soldier there when police, shouting and with guns drawn, surrounded a man and ordered him to the ground.
Armed Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers stood outside the door where the gunman, identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, rushed in on Wednesday. Zehaf-Bibeau’s attack was the second in recent times by a convert to Islam to target Canadian soldiers.
The gunman, identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, was a 32-year-old Canadian man with a minor criminal record.
Dave Bathurst, a friend of Zehaf-Bibeau, told The Globe and Mail he had met him at a mosque in British Columbia, where he worked as a miner. Zehaf-Bibeau also served one day in jail for making threats in a 2011 incident in Montreal that his lawyer described to The Globe and Mail as “fairly minor and fairly bizarre.”
Bathurst said Zehaf-Bibeau did not appear to be an extremist, but was “erratic” and exhibited strange behavior. “We were having a conversation in a kitchen, and I don’t know how he worded it: He said the devil is after him,” Bathurst said, adding that Zehaf-Bibeau talked frequently about Shaytan, or Satan, being a presence in the world.
“I think he must have been mentally ill,” Bathurst said.
Bathurst added that he last saw Zehaf-Bibeau six weeks ago, when his friend said he planned to travel to Libya to study Islam.
Zehaf-Bibeau was blocked from traveling abroad by the federal government, however, over concerns that he was attempting to join up with foreign extremists.
In separate incident, a convert to Islam on Monday ran over two Canadian soldiers with his car, killing one, near Montreal.
Both attacks took place after Canada announced this month it would send six jets to take part in air strikes against Islamic State fighters who have taken over parts of Iraq and Syria.
In a brief address to the nation on Wednesday night, Prime Minister Harper pledged to redouble the country’s fight against “terrorist organizations.”
“Let there be no misunderstanding, we will not be intimidated. Canada will never be intimidated,” he said.
The two attacks in quick succession could push the Canadian government to pause and rethink before introducing a planned bill to change the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, said Wesley Wark, a professor at the University of Ottawa, who is an expert on national security and intelligence issues.
The bill to boost the powers of Canada’s main spy agency, CSIS, was due to be introduced in parliament this week.
“What the government is now confronting is a choice with going forward on whatever its original, probably small-scale changes might have been, or sitting back and thinking about whether there is something more that needs to be done,” he said.
