UPDATE: From the Daily Mail: “Police have arrested two students –- one “of Moroccan origin” — over the murder of six people shot dead in the Quebec City mosque carnage two days after Canada’s prime ,inister condemned Donald Trump’s immigration ban.”
Two gunman entered Quebec’s Islamic Cultural Center and opened fire, killing six people inside and wounding eight, according to police.
Le Journal de Quebec reported that the gunfire started at the Islamic center at around 8 p.m. There were approximately 40 people attending prayer service at the time of the shooting. The center’s president Mohamed Yangui said the shooters reloaded at least three times.
According to the Le Soleil newspaper, one of the arrested suspects was 27 years old and had a “Quebecois name.” The paper also reported that one of the suspects was armed with an AK-47.
One witness, who wanted to remain anonymous, told Radio Canada, a Canadian Broadcasting Company French-speaking outlet, that the two gunmen were masked.
One witness reported, “It seemed to me that they had a Quebecois accent. They started to fire, and as they shot they yelled, ‘Allahu akbar!’ The bullets hit people that were praying. People who were praying lost their lives. A bullet passed right over my head.”
“There were even kids. There was even a three-year-old who was with his father.”
The mosque had been targeted before, according to the CBC. Someone left a pig’s head on the steps of mosque during Ramadan last June.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the the shooting “a terrorist act.”
“It was with tremendous shock, sadness and anger that I heard of this evening’s tragic and fatal shooting at the Centre culturel islamique de Quebec located in the Ste-Foy neighborhood of the city of Quebec,” he said in a statement.
“Muslim-Canadians are an important part of our national fabric, and these senseless acts have no place in our communities, cities and country.”
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