(Bloomberg) — Police arrested a man accused of a violent rampage that left more than 10 people dead in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and shook a country unaccustomed to mass violence. He died soon after.
(Bloomberg) — Police arrested a man accused of a violent rampage that left more than 10 people dead in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and shook a country unaccustomed to mass violence. He died soon after.
The suspect, 32-year-old Myles Sanderson, went into medical distress shortly after his arrest on Wednesday afternoon. He was transported by ambulance to a Saskatoon hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Rhonda Blackmore, a spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said at a news conference. Sanderson died of self-inflicted wounds, according to the Associated Press.
The RCMP said they captured Sanderson near Rosthern, a town about 65 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of Saskatoon, the province’s largest city. The motivation for Sanderson’s alleged crimes remains unclear, Blackmore said.
“Unfortunately, now that Myles is deceased, we may never have an understanding of that motivation,” she said. “We’ve conducted 120 interviews to this point. There’s more that we have to do. But witnesses and people around him only have so much information.”
Sanderson and his brother Damien were the subjects of an intense manhunt after a stabbing spree on Labor Day weekend in the James Smith Cree Nation and the nearby community of Weldon that left 10 people dead and nearly 20 injured. Damien Sanderson’s body was later discovered with wounds that police said did not appear to be self-inflicted.
The killings gripped a country where mass violence is relatively rare and guns are more tightly controlled than in the US. People enjoying the holiday weekend in Canada’s prairie provinces received phone alerts urging them to be on the lookout for the suspects.
“It was a massive investigation and a massive search,” Blackmore said. “Every technical capability that we could access was made available to us.”
Two years ago, an individual killed 22 people in Nova Scotia in an episode of gun violence that has resulted in a formal public inquiry. In 2019, two men suspected of killing three people in northern British Columbia evaded capture for weeks, before their bodies were found in Manitoba with fatal wounds that investigators determined were proof of suicide.
(Updates with additional information from police news conference.)
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