Montreal:
Police in Canada’s largest city, Toronto, shot and killed a man armed with a rifle on Thursday, local media reported, in an incident that closed several schools just two days after a deadly attack on an American elementary school.
Bystanders alerted police to the man’s presence in an eastern Toronto neighborhood, and the circumstances of what happened next were not immediately clear.
But the city’s police chief, James Ramer, told reporters the suspect, described as a man in his late teens or early 20s, was dead after “confronting” the officers, without further elaboration.
The police’s Twitter account states that after officers found the man, a “police firearm” was “dropped off”.
A spokeswoman for the Special Investigations Unit told the CBC that preliminary evidence showed that two police officers had fired their weapons and that the suspect had been pronounced dead at the scene.
It is not clear whether the man was holding the weapon when police shot him.
Ramer said he was unable to provide more details as the incident is still under investigation.
“There is no threat to public safety,” he said.
“Because of the proximity to a school, I certainly understand the trauma and how traumatic this must have been for staff, students and parents, given the recent events in the United States,” the chief added.
On Tuesday, a shooting at a Texas elementary school killed 21 children, including 19 children and two teachers.
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