A shadowy pay-for-violence network is recruiting young people to open fire on synagogues and Jewish sites across Toronto, filming each attack as proof of work, the city’s police chief said Tuesday, describing a campaign of fear whose paymasters investigators are still racing to identify.
Chief Myron Demkiw told a press conference that a string of shootings and arson attacks on Jewish institutions in Toronto and other Canadian cities has been carried out by what police are calling criminals for hire, none of them yet fatal to bystanders but all of them deliberate. The attackers, he said, are being lured through encrypted messaging apps and handed a chilling condition of payment.
“In order to get paid, they’re required to film their attacks,” Demkiw said, according to The Toronto Star. “Who’s paying for this? This is what we are trying to determine.” Whoever it is, the chief added, clearly wants to spread fear through the Jewish community.
The recruits are young, and at least one operation has already turned deadly for the people chasing them. Last week, Toronto police executed a series of warrants tied to the shootings, and during one pre-dawn raid Constable Marc Pinizzotto, a 43-year-old member of the force’s Emergency Task Force, was shot and killed. Police have charged three people in the broader probe, most recently an 18-year-old, and are still hunting a 19-year-old suspect, Zara Jabbi, whom they have described as armed and dangerous and wanted in connection with a brazen shooting at the United States consulate.
That consulate attack is the thread that ties Toronto’s local terror to something far larger. On a March morning, two gunmen sprayed the exterior of the US consulate and vanished in a white Honda, leaving no casualties but a trail investigators have been pulling at ever since. According to a criminal complaint filed in a New York court, the man who orchestrated it was Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, an Iraqi-Iranian national US prosecutors describe as a senior figure in the Iran-backed militia Kata’ib Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Al-Saadi, prosecutors allege, ran a transnational terror operation from the shadows, paying local criminals in foreign cities to strike Jewish, Israeli and American targets and demanding they record the violence for propaganda. The same grim signature, attacks filmed for an audience, that Demkiw described in Toronto. US court documents tie Al-Saadi to at least 18 small-scale attacks and arsons across Europe and two in Canada, including the consulate shooting and an assault on a Toronto shul, framed as retaliation for American and Israeli strikes on Iran. On one recorded call cited by prosecutors, he allegedly boasted that in Canada, as in Europe and America, “we have our guys.”
Arrested in Turkey and extradited to the United States, Al-Saadi has pleaded not guilty. His defense is: “we are in a war situation.” Toronto police, for their part, have been careful in public, with Demkiw stopping short of naming Iran as the hand behind his city’s shootings even as he acknowledged that bad actors are using local criminal muscle to carry out the attacks.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
