Several people are dead and “multiple others” are injured after a car drove into a crowd at a Filipino street party in Vancouver, Canada, police have said. The Sunday Times has more.
A man drove into a large crowd of people attending the Lapu Lapu Day festival near East 43rd Avenue and Fraser Street at about 8.14pm local time (4.14am BST) on Saturday, the force said.
The suspected driver, a 30 year-old Vancouver man, was initially taken into custody by people at the scene before being arrested. Police said he was a “lone suspect” known to them.
The incident was described as a mass casualty incident, and the major crime unit is investigating, but police later said they were “confident that this incident was not an act of terrorism”.
Lapu Lapu Day celebrations had officially ended at 8pm on an adjacent street. The province of British Columbia has recognised April 27th as Lapu Lapu Day, a day to honour a 16th-century indigenous leader of the Philippines and celebrate the Filipino community, since 2023.
The exact number of dead and injured was unclear, but witnesses described seeing “bodies everywhere”.
Yoseb Vardeh, co-owner of a food truck called Bao Buns, told Postmedia: “I got outside my food truck, I looked down the road and there’s just bodies everywhere. He went through the whole block, he went straight down the middle.”
Jen Idaba-Castaneto, a security guard for the festival, told the local news site Vancouver Is Awesome: “You don’t know who to help, here or there. It’s so shocking.”
Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, was among the attendees at the event, but left minutes before the vehicle arrived.
“This is so horrific, I don’t even know what to say,” Singh told CTV. “I was just there, and I just imagine the faces of the kids that I saw smiling and dancing.”
One witness told CTV he had seen a black vehicle driving erratically in the area just before the crowd was hit.
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