HUNTER: Ottawa wedding massacre was summer 2023’s bloody coda

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Blood-soaked weddings are something typically left to Hollywood screenwriters.

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But in the Canada of 2023, an epic settling of accounts a la Games of Thrones appears to be our new reality. The word sanctity has now officially been scrubbed from the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Murder is now an unwelcome spectre at funerals, baptisms and birthday parties. As of Labour Day weekend, you can add weddings to the list.

On Saturday at about 10:30 p.m., in the parking lot of the Infinity Convention Centre in Ottawa’s south end, where a wedding reception was underway, gunfire erupted.

One witness told Postmedia she heard the “clap, clap, clap” of bullets being fired. Another believed “15 or 16” shots were discharged.

When the dust had cleared, wedding guests Said Mohamed Ali, 26, and Abdishakur Abdi-Dahir, 29, were dead. Both victims were from Toronto and Abdi-Dahir reportedly worked at Pearson airport.

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Six others were treated at hospital for non-life-threatening wounds.

This was at a wedding where, traditionally, someone may get too hammered, come on to the bride’s mother or trigger a donnybrook with some other kind of bad behaviour.

No more. Now, it’s bullets.

Cops, local pols and others declared the incident an outrage and unacceptable and used other emotion-packed words from the “We Care” homicide PR playbook.

Investigators have said the slayings were not a hate crime. They did, however, intimate something about guns and gangs.

“I then see people running and screaming and yelling that someone got shot. We hid in the washroom (until it was clear). It’s so scary that people got shot and some innocent girl’s wedding got ruined,” said one woman, who asked not to be identified out of fear of reprisals.

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The Ottawa slayings were a bloody coda to a most violent summer across the country.

Between June 21 — the official start of summer — and Labour Day, its unofficial conclusion, approximately 200 Canadians were shot, stabbed, burned or beaten to death. Murder did not take a holiday during the summer of 2023.

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Shahid Todd was the first to lose his life.

The 25-year-old was pulled from Lake Ontario at the end of Oakwood Ave. near Port Credit on June 21 around 8:30 p.m. Todd, who had been shot, was dead at the scene while a female companion was expected to recover from her gunshot wounds.

Cops said the incident was, of course, “targeted.”

Three years ago, Todd had been charged with attempted murder in a Mississauga shooting. He later pleaded guilty to robbery.

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Between the targeted murder of Todd and the brazen attack at the wedding in Ottawa, there was more violence.

There were two double murders in Kirkland Lake, along with another single slaying in the small northern Ontario town; the senseless dine-and-dash beating death of a beloved owner of an Owen Sound curry house; and innocent bystander Karolina Huebner-Makurat, a 44-year-old mother of two, being killed by a stray bullet on July 7 in fast-gentrifying Leslieville.

And the list goes on.

The book end on the right side of this library of death was, of course, the double murder at the wedding in Ottawa.

So far, cops have not named any suspects nor have they released descriptions. A motive floats in the wind.

But on the final weekend of a glorious Canadian summer, we saw the murder bar move once again. Always lower, ever lower.

There has been some lip service to the latest outrage but we shouldn’t expect much. Our federal politicians still have two weeks left in their long summer sojourn.

No doubt hoping that this nasty bit of business will all be forgotten by the time the House sits once more. None of that consequences nonsense for us.

[email protected]

@HunterTOSun

Article content

Article content

Blood-soaked weddings are something typically left to Hollywood screenwriters.

Article content

But in the Canada of 2023, an epic settling of accounts a la Games of Thrones appears to be our new reality. The word sanctity has now officially been scrubbed from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Article content

Murder is now an unwelcome spectre at funerals, baptisms and birthday parties. As of Labour Day weekend, you can add weddings to the list.

On Saturday at about 10:30 p.m., in the parking lot of the Infinity Convention Centre in Ottawa’s south end, where a wedding reception was underway, gunfire erupted.

One witness told Postmedia she heard the “clap, clap, clap” of bullets being fired. Another believed “15 or 16” shots were discharged.

When the dust had cleared, wedding guests Said Mohamed Ali, 26, and Abdishakur Abdi-Dahir, 29, were dead. Both victims were from Toronto and Abdi-Dahir reportedly worked at Pearson airport.

Article content

Article content

Six others were treated at hospital for non-life-threatening wounds.

This was at a wedding where, traditionally, someone may get too hammered, come on to the bride’s mother or trigger a donnybrook with some other kind of bad behaviour.

No more. Now, it’s bullets.

Cops, local pols and others declared the incident an outrage and unacceptable and used other emotion-packed words from the “We Care” homicide PR playbook.

Investigators have said the slayings were not a hate crime. They did, however, intimate something about guns and gangs.

“I then see people running and screaming and yelling that someone got shot. We hid in the washroom (until it was clear). It’s so scary that people got shot and some innocent girl’s wedding got ruined,” said one woman, who asked not to be identified out of fear of reprisals.

Article content

The Ottawa slayings were a bloody coda to a most violent summer across the country.

Between June 21 — the official start of summer — and Labour Day, its unofficial conclusion, approximately 200 Canadians were shot, stabbed, burned or beaten to death. Murder did not take a holiday during the summer of 2023.

RECOMMENDED VIDEO

Shahid Todd was the first to lose his life.

The 25-year-old was pulled from Lake Ontario at the end of Oakwood Ave. near Port Credit on June 21 around 8:30 p.m. Todd, who had been shot, was dead at the scene while a female companion was expected to recover from her gunshot wounds.

Cops said the incident was, of course, “targeted.”

Three years ago, Todd had been charged with attempted murder in a Mississauga shooting. He later pleaded guilty to robbery.

Article content

Between the targeted murder of Todd and the brazen attack at the wedding in Ottawa, there was more violence.

There were two double murders in Kirkland Lake, along with another single slaying in the small northern Ontario town; the senseless dine-and-dash beating death of a beloved owner of an Owen Sound curry house; and innocent bystander Karolina Huebner-Makurat, a 44-year-old mother of two, being killed by a stray bullet on July 7 in fast-gentrifying Leslieville.

And the list goes on.

The book end on the right side of this library of death was, of course, the double murder at the wedding in Ottawa.

So far, cops have not named any suspects nor have they released descriptions. A motive floats in the wind.

But on the final weekend of a glorious Canadian summer, we saw the murder bar move once again. Always lower, ever lower.

There has been some lip service to the latest outrage but we shouldn’t expect much. Our federal politicians still have two weeks left in their long summer sojourn.

No doubt hoping that this nasty bit of business will all be forgotten by the time the House sits once more. None of that consequences nonsense for us.

[email protected]

@HunterTOSun

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