Six people, including four children, were killed in the Canadian capital Ottawa late on Wednesday, police said on Thursday, rocking a country where mass murders are rare.
Police quickly arrested a man and said the deaths did not appear to be linked to domestic or intimate partner violence.
“The scene is obviously a horrific one,” police chief Eric Stubbs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, without providing details on how the victims died.
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Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe, in a social media post, said it was “one of the most shocking incidents of violence in our city’s history”.
Ottawa, which has a population of one million, saw 14 murders in 2023 and 15 in 2022.
The victims were found inside a house in the southwestern suburb of Barrhaven and have not been identified.
Police arrived on the scene following emergency calls shortly before 11pm local time on Wednesday, they said in a statement.
Mass killings in Canada are infrequent. In December 2022, a man shot five people in a Toronto suburb before being gunned down by police.
In September that year, a man stabbed and killed 11 people in the western province of Saskatchewan. He died of a cocaine overdose shortly after being arrested by police.