The teenager lay next to his bloody sword when police captured him outside a Toronto massage parlor where one woman had been stabbed to death and another seriously injured.
A sexist epithet was engraved on the sword and a note promoting an ideology of violence against women was found in the teenager’s pocket.
With the evidence stacked against him, he pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder. But a Canadian judge ruled that the attacks were acts of terrorism, in part because the teenager wanted to send the message that he hated women.
On Tuesday, Judge Suhail Akhtar sentenced the teenager, who was 17 at the time of the attack. – to life imprisonment, although he would be entitled to parole after 10 years. Under Canadian juvenile justice laws, his name cannot be published.
The case represents the first time in Canada that the murder of a woman killed because of her gender has been prosecuted as an act of terrorism, a charge that increases the length of a prison sentence.
In a country grappling with recent high-profile attacks against women, the case highlights how Canada is rethinking the classification of some violent acts as terrorism.
The teenager has embraced the ideology of an online group whose members call themselves incels, or “involuntary celibates,” and who denigrate women and blame them for denying incels what they believe is their right to sex.
Adherents of the group have launched other attacks in Canada over the years, including a deadly attack five years ago in Toronto in which a man drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians, killing 10 people and wounding 16 others.
Incel ideology has been linked to the killing or wounding of 110 people in the United States and Canada since 2014, according to the Canadian Intelligence Agency, which in a report called incel attacks “a growing and concerning area of gender discrimination”. violence.”
Canada has generally reserved terrorism charges for religious extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and similar groups. But the judge overseeing the Toronto massage parlor case said in a ruling that the defendant “was motivated by incel ideology and wanted to send a message to society that incels were prepared to kill and commit violence.”
The teenager admitted killing Ashley Arzaga, 24, and wounding another woman, whose name cannot be published under court orders.
After the defendant’s guilty plea, the prosecution asked that the attacks be classified as terrorism to increase his possible prison sentence. Otherwise he would have risked a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Justice Akhtar, in sentencing the accused, said he had shown maturity beyond his age and sophistication in planning the attack. He had spent months researching videos and other research on misogynistic ideology, the judge said, and rejected the defendant’s argument that he had been “brainwashed” by incels.
“The murder of Ms. Arzaga, captured on video, reflects the evils of that ideology,” Judge Akhtar said, adding that the defendant “did not simply kill Ms. Arzaga. She butchered her.”
The teenager’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that their client wanted to intimidate a large section of the public and that the defendant’s ideology did not rise to the level of terrorism.
During an earlier sentencing hearing in October, the defendant, reading from a handwritten sheet of paper, said, “I don’t hate women or anyone,” and added that he would like to “travel back in time and make the man see reason.” my ex.” himself.”
Ms. Arzaga’s sister, who was present in the courtroom for part of the trial and asked prosecutors to be identified publicly only by her initials, provided a victim impact statement that was read in court.
“I think the most emotionally taxing part of it all is watching my granddaughter celebrate Mother’s Day at the cemetery,” the statement read.
The country’s handling of the case echoes a growing movement in Latin America to more aggressively address the killing of women in the region, which according to United Nations data has reached crisis levels. At least 18 countries have passed laws to protect women by creating a class of murder known as femicide, adding harsher penalties and drawing more law enforcement attention to the issue.
In February 2020, the Toronto teenager targeted a massage parlor called Crown Spa, where Ms. Arzaga, a woman he had never met, worked the front desk, according to the judge who presided over the trial. She pulled a 17-inch knife, described in court as a sword, from under her coat pocket and stabbed Ms Arzaga 42 times.
Her screams sound like those of a female manager running towards the reception area where the teenager also stabbed her in the chest while shouting misogynistic insults and cut off part of her finger. The manager took the sword away from the teenager and stabbed him in the back, the judge said.
The woman suffered serious injuries to her hands, arm and leg and, reading her victim impact statement at the previous hearing, said she “will always be vividly remembered of the pure evil that lies in the shadows”.
The teenager walked out of the spa and lay on the floor with the sword next to him. He had written “THOT slayer” on the sword. THOT is a crude epithet commonly used in the incel community to belittle women, according to an expert who testified at the trial.
The defendant also told paramedics after the attack that he wanted to kill everyone in the spa. “I’m happy I got one,” he told them, according to the judge’s ruling.
In the teenager’s pocket, police found a plastic bag with a knife sharpening stone, a driver’s license and a piece of paper with the words “Long live the Incel Rebellion”, a reference to one of the worst murders mass of Canadian history.
The perpetrator of that attack, Alek Minassian, a university student, made incels a household word after he hit pedestrians with a rental van on a busy Toronto street in 2018.
Mr. Minassian was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years, but was not charged with terrorism.
Perhaps the highest-profile attack against women in Canada was the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989, in which a gunman killed 14 women and wounded 12 others before turning the gun on himself.
Canadian terrorism prosecutions are different from other types of criminal cases. Typically, an accused person’s intent to commit a crime to intimidate and frighten the public is part of the standard for assigning blame, said Leah West, a law professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and co-author of a study. paper on how forms of extremism such as incel violence fit into Canadian terrorism laws.
Canadian prosecutors must also prove that the accused was motivated by a specific ideology, the professor said. West said, although the law is unclear on what qualifies as ideology.
“We have this kind of amorphous term that we don’t really know what it means, and it’s a key element in proving terrorism that someone has committed,” Prof. West said.
However, some legal experts say pursuing a terrorism charge is justified to highlight how dangerous some ideas can be and what they can cause.
But some women’s groups and anti-violence advocates say leaning on a terrorist strategy to address attitudes that fuel misogyny can obscure the severity of other acts of violence against women that are much more common.
“When a woman is killed by her domestic partner, you still have a dead woman and we don’t usually label that terrorism,” said Janine Benedet, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, “even though that’s also an expression of sexism and expression of misogyny”.
