From left to right: A court reporter, Justice Renee Pomerance, Crown counsel Jennifer Moser, Crown counsel Sarah Shaikh, defence counsel Peter Ketcheson, Nathaniel Veltman and defence counsel Christopher Hicks look on in this courtroom sketch, in London, Ont., on Jan. 23.Alexandra Newbould/The Canadian Press
Prosecutors closed their case against Nathaniel Veltman on Tuesday by arguing his murders should be considered terrorist acts because they were specifically planned to spread fear among Muslims and inspire follow-up attacks by other white nationalists.
Mr. Veltman, a 23-year-old from London, Ont., was convicted by a jury in November of murdering four members of a Muslim family, but the court has yet to decide whether the June, 2021, attack also meets the legal standard of being a terrorist crime under Canadian law.
“I would like to take some time to consider everything that I heard,” Justice Renee Pomerance of Ontario Superior Court said at the close of the day’s proceedings. She said she would release her decision Feb. 22.
Any findings of terrorist-motivated crime would not alter Mr. Veltman’s sentence: He has been convicted of first-degree murder, which means a mandatory sentence of 25 years before he is eligible for parole. However, a terrorist designation could affect how correctional officials assess his eventual prospects for release.
Declaring Mr. Veltman’s killings an act of a terrorism would also serve as a strong signal that the criminal justice system in Canada condemns the violent white nationalist causes that he championed. Prior to his being charged in 2021, no such cases had ever been pursued as terrorism prosecutions in the country. Since then, several terrorism cases against individuals alleged to be neo-Nazis have been launched.
The London attack at the centre of one of Canada’s most closely watched trials
The evidence that Mr. Veltman is a terrorist “is overwhelming,” prosecutor Sarah Shaikh told the court, recalling how he wrote diatribes against Muslims and mass immigration in the months before he spotted a family wearing traditional Pakistani clothing at a London intersection.
During that attack, Mr. Veltman was wearing body armour and carrying bladed weapons in his Dodge Ram pickup truck, which he accelerated into the group – killing Salman Afzaal and his wife, Madiha, both in their 40s; their 15-year-old daughter Yumnah; and her paternal grandmother, Talat, 74.
The Afzaals’ nine-year-old son survived the attack. Mr. Veltman was also convicted by the jury of attempting to murder him. Whether that crime was terrorist act also still needs to be assessed by the court.
“He has been left an orphan,” Ms. Shaikh told the judge in her arguments. She recalled how Mr. Veltman confessed as he was being arrested immediately after his attack. “He admitted to police that he was ‘100 per cent politically motivated.’ ”
During Tuesday’s proceedings, Mr. Veltman addressed Judge Pomerance directly. “I’m sorry for this pain and suffering that I caused. I cannot turn back time,” he said.
Defence lawyer Christopher Hicks argued that his client was a murderer but not a terrorist. He portrayed Mr. Veltman as a disturbed 20-year-old at the time of the attack.
One of the defence arguments is that Mr. Veltman could not be a terrorist because while he wrote a manifesto, he had never circulated it. “He never shared it with anybody,” Mr. Hicks said. “Nobody even knows that he composed this tract.”
The Crown contends that Mr. Veltman’s manifesto is a stark example of an inherently violent conspiracy theory that urges its adherents to push non-European immigrants back to their homelands.
“The replacement theory is a white supremacist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant concept that posits that white people are being replaced by immigrants, in particular Muslims,” Ms. Shaikh told the court.
Earlier this month, scores of relatives in the Afzaal family testified in victim-impact statements. These witnesses, some of them children, said that Mr. Veltman’s attack left them traumatized, depressed and fearful of follow-up attacks.
In November, a Toronto judge sentenced a 21-year-old to life in prison in a similar case with a different ideology. Oguzhan Sert used a sword to murder one woman and attempt to kill another in an attack that a court found was launched on behalf of an online group that advocates misogynistic terrorism.
Mr. Sert was punished as an adult in that case even though he was 17 when he committed the crimes. Part of reason was that Justice Suhail Akhtar had ruled that the teen was guilty of being committed to a terrorist ideology when he launched his attack.