A driver plowed right into a avenue pageant honoring Canada’s Filipino inhabitants in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Saturday night, killing “numerous folks,” in accordance with the native police.
The police mentioned they’d taken one suspect into custody: the driving force, a 30-year-old man from Vancouver. In a information convention in a single day, native officers didn’t specify the variety of fatalities and injured, saying solely that they have been a number of.
Additionally they didn’t handle a doable motive, however mentioned the driving force had already been identified to the police. Members of the group had subdued the person earlier than the police received to the scene.
Individuals have been out celebrating the Lapu Lapu Day pageant within the southern a part of the town when the driving force went into the group shortly after 8 p.m., the Vancouver Police Division said on social media.
Video from the native information media confirmed ambulances and police vehicles lining the roads close to the pageant, with emergency medical staff tending to folks on the bottom.
Vancouver’s mayor, Ken Sim, said he was “shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific incident.”
A spokeswoman for the Vancouver Normal Hospital mentioned they’d acquired a number of sufferers who have been injured on the pageant.
In a social media publish, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada mentioned he was “devastated to listen to in regards to the horrific occasions on the Lapu Lapu pageant in Vancouver earlier this night.”
“I provide my deepest condolences to the family members of these killed and injured, to the Filipino Canadian group, and to everybody in Vancouver,” he mentioned. “We’re all mourning with you.”
Lapu Lapu Day was formally declared on April 27, 2023, by the province of British Columbia as a testomony to the legacy of Datu Lapu-Lapu, a chieftain from Mactan, Philippines, who is taken into account a nationwide hero for rising up in opposition to Spanish colonizers within the early 1500s. Authorities mentioned that as much as 100,000 folks had attended the pageant on Saturday.
There are practically 1,000,000 Filipino immigrants and folks of Filipino descent dwelling in Canada, in accordance with the federal government. The province of British Columbia is house to almost a fifth of that quantity.
