15 hours ago
Several people were killed and others injured when a driver ploughed a car into a crowd at a street festival in the Canadian city of Vancouver, local police have said.
Police said they were confident that the incident on Saturday was not an act of terrorism. A 30-year-old man who was driving a black SUV was arrested.
“A number of people have been killed and multiple others are injured,” Vancouver police posted online. “The driver is in custody.”
The incident happened shortly after 8pm as members of the city’s Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival commemorates a Filipino anticolonial leader from the 16th century.
Footage posted online showed a black SUV with a damaged bonnet parked on a street littered with debris as first aiders tended to people lying on the ground.
One witness told CTV News he saw a vehicle driving erratically in the area of the festival just before the crowd was hit. The Vancouver Sun said thousands of people had been in the area.
“I didn’t get to see the driver, all I heard was an engine rev,” said Yoseb Vardeh, a food truck operator, in an interview with Postmedia.
“I got outside my food truck, I looked down the road and there’s just bodies everywhere,” said Vardeh. “He went through the whole block, he went straight down the middle.”
The Vancouver mayor, Ken Sim, said: “Our thoughts are with all those affected and with Vancouver’s Filipino community during this incredibly difficult time.”
The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said he was devastated at the news. “I offer my deepest condolences to the loved ones of those killed and injured, to the Filipino Canadian community, and to everyone in Vancouver,” he wrote on X. “We are all mourning with you.”
The incident happened just before Canadians go to the polls on Monday after a frenetic election race where candidates have wooed voters on issues including rising living costs and tackling Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Carney is favoured to win after promising voters he would stand up to Washington’s sweeping import levies.
Police set up a 24-hour assistance centre to help anyone who had been unable to contact relatives of friends who were at the festival.
Lapu Lapu Day is celebrated in the Philippines in remembrance of the Indigenous chief Lapulapu, who led his men to defeat the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in battle in 1521.
