MONTREAL — The seven homicides that occurred in Montreal in the last 10 days, including three on Tuesday evening, are not linked to organized crime according to the Montreal City Police Service (SPVM), which tried to reassure the population during a press conference Wednesday morning.
The SPVM police officers “have worked extremely hard in the last ten days,” indicated the commander of the Major Crimes Section of the police service Jean-Sébastien Caron, who said he was satisfied with the way the investigations were progressing in the files of homicides perpetrated on its territory recently.
On Saturday, a woman was murdered in the Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension district. On Tuesday, a 27-year-old Montrealer was shot and killed near the Central Market, in the Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough, and a few days earlier, a man was shot dead in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal.
“If we exclude yesterday’s event, there were still four homicides and we had still made three arrests in three out of four cases,” said Commander Caron.
By citing “yesterday’s event”, Jean-Sébastien Caron was referring to the three young people, one of whom was only 15 years old, who were killed Tuesday evening when a fight turned sour on Le Plateau- Mont Royal. The suspects in this case are still at large.
“We are recovering evidence” and “we have a good idea of what happened,” said the commander during the press conference, to the point where the police “will be able to say exactly what happened” over “the next few hours or maybe the next few days.”
According to the information that the SPVM has transmitted so far, the police were first called around 7 p.m. on Tuesday to go to an alley located between Saint-André and Mentana streets. When officers arrived on scene, they found three youths who had been injured by a sharp object.
The three victims, aged 15, 23 and 25, were transported to hospital, where they died.
Not linked to organized crime
These recent murders are “conflicts that degenerated or people who were directly targeted by suspects,” said Commander Caron.
“If it had been murders linked to organized crime with wars, territories or wars between street gangs (…), I would have told you, I would have been open to mentioning it to you, but now, we don’t “It’s really not this kind of event,” he said.
