Five people were killed after gunmen opened fire in a Quebec
City mosque during evening prayers, the mosque’s president told reporters on
Sunday.
Gunmen open fire in a mosque in Quebec City, Canada
Earlier, a witness told Reuters that up to three gunmen
fired on about 40 people inside the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Center. Police
put up a security perimeter around the mosque.
Quebec police confirmed the shooting at a Quebec mosque in a
tweet, and police on the scene said there had been fatalities.
“There are many victims … there are deaths,” a Quebec
police spokesman told reporters.
A police tweet said there were deaths and injuries and that
suspects had been arrested.
“Why is this happening here? This is barbaric,” said the
mosque’s president, Mohamed Yangui.
Yangui, who was not inside the mosque when the shooting
occurred, said he got frantic calls from people at evening prayers. He did not
know how many were injured, saying they had been taken to different hospitals
across Quebec City.
In June 2016, a pig’s head was left on the doorstep of the
cultural centre.
Like France, Quebec has struggled at times to reconcile its
secular identity with a rising Muslim population, many of them North African
emigrants.
The face-covering, or niqab, became a big issue in the 2015
national Canadian election, especially in Quebec, where the vast majority of
the population supported a ban on it at citizenship ceremonies.
Incidents of Islamophobia have increased in Quebec in recent
years. In 2013, police investigated after a mosque in the Saguenay region of
Quebec was splattered with what was believed to be pig blood.
In the neighboring province of Ontario, a mosque was set on
fire in 2015, a day after an attack by gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris.
Reuters
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