“Toronto condemns swordsmen as terrorists,” says Crown

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The teenager who brutally slashed a receptionist at a North York massage parlor with a sword 42 times on behalf of the “Incel Rebellion,” seriously injuring her manager, should be convicted as a terrorist, prosecutors say.

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If successful, the youth – who can only be identified as OS – would become the first person in Canada to be convicted under the Terrorism Act of violence in the name of an ideology. Not even Alek Minassian – the truck ram driver who murdered 11 people in 2018 – has been prosecuted under the criminal code’s terror provision.

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“There is a high public interest in denouncing and deterring ideologically motivated crimes,” Crown Lisa Matthews said at his sentencing hearing on Tuesday, adding that OS sees itself as “foot soldiers” in the incel movement, women and society a lack of sexual success blames these crimes.

“Terrorism is defined as an act of violence with a political, religious, or ideological purpose or cause, aimed at intimidating,” Matthews argued, and OS proudly proclaimed that he was motivated by the involuntarily celibate subculture by witnessing it himself at the scene and expressed on his online profile and the note he had in his pocket that day.

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“These are messages to the world that he sent with his horrific, brutal attack on any two women just because they were women,” Matthews told Supreme Court Justice Suhail Akhtar.

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OS, now 20, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and attempted murder last September February 24, 2020 Murder of Ashley Arzaga, a 24-year-old mother of a baby girl, and her colleague in the bloody attack at the Crown Spa at 3598 Dufferin St.

In the agreed statement, read at his guilty plea, the friendless 17-year-old high school dropout admitted to being immersed in the incels’ misogynistic online world; OHis profile name on the gaming platform Steam was “The killer‘ in Arabic and he described himself as ‘proud incel,” “Seeker of Martyrdom‘ and a hater of ‘Feminists/Atheists/Satanists and all sorts of other degenerates.“

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He wanted to follow the movement’s heroes – like Minassian – and devise his own infamous plan Attack, said Matthews akhtar.

OS bought a 17 inch sword from Amazon and hand engraved it with the words “This hunter” – an acronym for “That Hoe Over There,” the incel slang for bitch. He told police that he decided to target sex workers because he felt they were sex workers “Were not very clean people.”

Intending to become a martyr to be killed by the police, he wrote a note: “Long live them Incel rebellion‘ – and weighed it down with a rock in its pocket so that when it died it would be discovered and the world would know’People like us exist, and it really isn’t just.”

OS then donned dark glasses and a long black trench coat like those worn by Columbine gunmen, fastened his sword to his belt, and walked a mile to the Crown Spa.

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Arzaga was at the front desk when the killer walked in at 12:34 p.m. In a gruesome attack caught on video, OS slashed her open more than three dozen times.

Her manager, who cannot be identified, heard Arzaga’s screams and found her battered body in a pool of blood. As she tried to flee, OS chased after her, knocked her out and yelled, “You damn whore“, “you f***** female dog” “Die die die.”

Instead, she managed to snatch the sword from him and stab him in the back.

“I wanted kill everyone in the building‘ he said to paramedic Jongsuk Oh, ‘and I am Happy I have a.”

OS attorney Maurice Mattis argued that the incel attack did not reach the level of terrorism and that if used here, the definition would be so broad that it would “open the floodgates” to include anyone , acting on the basis of a loose ideology . The law is intended for people belonging to organized terror groups, Mattis said, and not for instigators who live in disjointed chat rooms online.

Akhtar, who seemed unconvinced by his reasoning, said he would rule on the precedent issue before lawyers argue over whether OS should be sentenced as an adult or a juvenile.

“This is a new topic and it needs thorough examination,” he said.

mmandel@postmedia.com