Sri Lankan family killed in Canadian capital Ottawa in rare case of mass murder

Six people, including four children, were killed in the Canadian capital Ottawa late on Wednesday, police said on Thursday, rocking a country where mass murders are rare.

A seventh person was in hospital with serious, but non-life-threatening, injuries.

Police quickly arrested a man and said the deaths did not appear to be linked to domestic or intimate partner violence.

“The scene is obviously a horrific one,” police chief Eric Stubbs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, without providing details on how the victims died.

Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe, in a social media post, said it was “one of the most shocking incidents of violence in our city’s history”. Ottawa, which has a population of 1 million, saw 14 murders in 2023 and 15 in 2022.

The victims were found inside a house in the southwestern suburb of Barrhaven.

Sri Lanka’s high commission in Ottawa said the victims were a family of Sri Lankan nationals. The high commission said the father survived but his wife and children died, adding that it is in touch with relatives in the country’s capital of Colombo.

Canadian authorities have not confirmed the identities of the deceased, their ages or the identity of the person in hospital.

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Don Perera, a neighbour, said he met the family that lived in the home last fall at a Halloween party at the nearby Catholic junior school. He said the father was from Sri Lanka.

Shanti Ramesh, who lives across the street, was alerted to a commotion late Wednesday. From her balcony, she saw a man sitting on the driveway of the home and yelling before two police officers arrived and carried him away.

Police arrived on the scene following emergency calls shortly before 11pm on Wednesday, they said in a statement.

Mass killings in Canada are infrequent.

In December 2022, a man shot five people in a Toronto suburb before being gunned down by police.

In September that year, a man stabbed and killed 11 people in the western province of Saskatchewan. He died of a cocaine overdose shortly after being arrested by police.

Reuters and Associated Press