A driver plowed right into a road competition honoring Canada’s Filipino inhabitants in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Saturday night, killing “quite a lot of folks,” in keeping with the native police.
The police mentioned that they had taken one suspect into custody: the motive 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 had been a number of.
Additionally they didn’t handle a attainable motive, however mentioned the motive force had already been identified to the police. Members of the group had subdued the person earlier than the police obtained to the scene.
Folks had been out celebrating the Lapu Lapu Day competition within the southern a part of the town when the motive 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 automobiles lining the roads close to the competition, with emergency medical employees 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 that they had obtained a number of sufferers who had been injured on the competition.
In a social media publish, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada mentioned he was “devastated to listen to concerning the horrific occasions on the Lapu Lapu competition in Vancouver earlier this night.”
“I provide my deepest condolences to the family members of these killed and injured, to the Filipino Canadian neighborhood, 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 competition on Saturday.
There are practically one million Filipino immigrants and folks of Filipino descent residing in Canada, in keeping with the federal government. The province of British Columbia is residence to almost a fifth of that quantity.
