Police have identified the suspect in a deadly van attack in Toronto as Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old man from Richmond Hill, Ont., a suburb north of the city.
Ten people were killed and 15 injured on Monday afternoon after a rented white Ryder van jumped a curb and plowed into pedestrians along an approximately one-kilometre-long stretch of Toronto's busy Yonge Street.
A profile on social networking site LinkedIn identifies Minassian as a student at Seneca College in North York, the north Toronto neighbourhood where the attack took place.
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Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told reporters that while the day's events were "horrendous," they do not appear to represent a larger threat to national security.
At a news conference Monday night, Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders declined to speculate about a motive, saying authorities were still investigating. But he said the driver's actions "definitely looked deliberate."
"We are looking very strongly to what the exact motivation was for this particular incident to take place," he said. "At the end of the day, we will have a fulsome answer, and we will have a fulsome account as to what the conclusion of this is."
Yet one possible explanation has emerged online that suggests Minassian was angry over being rebuffed by women.
A Facebook post by a man with the same name and the same photo as the one that appears on Minassian's LinkedIn profile refers to the "Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger," a 22-year-old responsible for a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that left six people dead and a dozen more injured.
In a video posted ahead of that 2014 attack, Rodger raged about a number of women turning down his advances, rendering men like him "incels," a term that stands for "involuntarily celibate."
Rodger referred to the men who always seemed to win with women as "Chads" and the women who turned men down as "Stacys."
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The posting that appears to be by Minassian says the "incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and the Stacys."
CBC News has not been able to independently verify the post as having been written by Minassian.
Cellphone video posted to social media on Monday afternoon shows a man stepping out of a white van with a damaged front end that is stopped on the sidewalk. He steps into the line of fire a police officer who has his weapon drawn and can be heard yelling, "Kill me" and gesturing at the officer to shoot him.
Saunders said Monday night that no gun was found on the male driver at the time of his arrest. He said Minassian was not previously known to Toronto police.
The driver was apprehended about 25 minutes after the van first began careening southbound down Yonge Street, the police chief said. The vehicle was at times travelling along the sidewalk and at other times against traffic in the northbound lanes of the busy street, a major artery in Toronto.
Saunders said there is a "tremendous amount" of work underway by investigators to process the scene, which he described as "very large" with a multitude of witnesses present at the time of the attack. He also said Toronto police are working with their federal and provincial counterparts as part of the investigation.