by Noah Gould
On Wednesday shots were fired outside the Canadian Parliament building. Witness reports vary, but it seems that somewhere between 20 and 30 shots were fired. The building was quickly put under lockdown and Prime Minister Harper was taken to safety. He had been addressing his cabinet at the time. “This means stay in your office, with the doors locked and away from the windows. If your door does not lock, find a way to barricade the door, if possible,” read the lockdown alert, circulated by email. “Do not open the door under any circumstances. Security Services has the required keys.” Prime Minister Harper later described the attack as a “despicable attack”. Early reports said that only three people were killed. The reports said that two were soldiers and one was the shooter.
Witness Scott Walsh was walking on the sidewalk a few blocks away from the Parliament building. He saw a man jump out of his Toyota Corolla and leave it running in the street. “He had a double-barrelled shotgun, he was about five feet from me, and he ran right beside us, ran past the woman with the stroller and child,” he said. Walsh than, at gunpoint, hijacked a dark car and drove to the Parliament building.
The shooter ran out of the black van parked in front of the parliament building. The two soldiers killed were guarding the war memorial outside the parliament building. After shooting them the shooter continued running into the parliament building. Police followed the shooter into the building. During the ensuing gunfight inside the shooter was killed.
An Ottawa hospital said that it received three patients one was pronounced dead the other two are in stable condition. The Canadian government reached out to the White House for help catching the terrorists. The FBI and NSA have already started working with Canadian officials in the investigation.Canada announced earlier this month that it will be joining in the campaign against Islamic Militant groups in Iraq. No information about the shooters has been released at this time. Police said the situation was “ongoing and fluid’. Marc Coucy of the Ottawa Police said they were looking for “multiple suspects” in shootings at three locations. Two days earlier in Ottawa a solider had been killed by a car driven by a jihadist sympathizer.
