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Serial killer who stalked Toronto’s gay village to be sentenced Friday
Article via TheWashingtonPost
For years, members of Toronto’s gay community warned there was a serial killer on the loose, that vulnerable men were going missing, that the streets were not safe. They were right.
On Friday, Bruce McArthur, a 67-year-old landscaper and former mall Santa, will be sentenced on eight counts of first-degree murder, ending a trial that shocked a city — and a country — that likes to see itself as inclusive and safe.
McArthur was accused of killing and dismembering eight men between 2010 and 2017, hiding seven of the corpses in planters and the eighth in a ravine. He pleaded guilty last month.
At a sentencing hearing that ended Tuesday, Canadians heard how he lured and murdered men he met in Toronto’s Gay Village, then posed corpses in costumes, keeping pictures of each victim in labeled digital folders.
They learned McArthur was stopped when police raided his home, finding a man tied to a bed. He was a potential ninth victim, the court heard, and McArthur had a folder waiting.
In a city that prides itself on being gay friendly and welcoming to new Canadians, McArthur sought out men marginalized by their sexuality, ethnicity, immigration status or poverty. Most of his victims were refugees or immigrants. Several struggled with substance abuse. Some had not revealed they were gay.
The details of the case are so brutal, the crimes so depraved, that the headlines at times obscured the fact eight men — Skandaraj Navaratnam, Majeed Kayhan, Abdulbasir Faizi, Soroush Mahmudi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Dean Lisowick, Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman — were killed.
Now, with the trial over, advocates want to put the focus back on why so many died before police cracked the case. Some have argued the police response was slowed by homophobia and racism — that the force might have acted more quickly if different men disappeared.
Asked about allegations of bias, Meaghan Gray, a spokeswoman for Toronto Police, said the force launched two investigations, Project Houston and Project Prism, “to do everything possible to locate the missing men.”
“We will continue to do what we can to support the community and look for opportunities to improve our relationship,” she said in an email.
Haran Vijayanathan, executive director of the South Asian Alliance for Aids Prevention and a longtime advocate for the victims and their families, praised the team of detectives that caught McArthur, but expressed anger that it seemed to take the murder of a white man, Kinsman, to spur action.
“This is a real wake-up call for Canada,” he said.
Toronto’s Gay Village is a couple blocks of shops, restaurants and bars in the heart of the city. It was there, in the early 1980s, that police raids on bathhouses spurred Canada’s gay rights movement.
McArthur was a regular in the area. Kyle Rae, Toronto’s first openly gay city councilor, recalled seeing him around. “I remember seeing Bruce McArthur sitting outside Starbucks. He was a fixture,” he said.
The first victim to go missing was Navaratnam, a refugee who fled Sri Lanka and settled in Toronto. He was last seen leaving a village bar in September 2010.
In December of the same year, Faizi, originally from Afghanistan, vanished. By 2012, Kayhan, also an immigrant from Afghanistan, was gone, too.
The disappearances of the three men sparked an investigation called Project Houston, for which officers interviewed McArthur. Eventually, the effort was disbanded. The killing resumed.
In 2016, McArthur was interviewed for a second time after a man claimed McArthur had tried to choke him. Detectives did not press charges. The officer who handled that case, Sgt. Paul Gauthier, now faces professional misconduct charges.
The break in the case came in June 2017, when Kinsman, a white, Canadian-born activist with deep ties to the community, went missing. By July, Project Prism was launched to look into his disappearance and another recent case.
Many in the community say they were convinced a serial killer was on the loose, an idea the police dismissed about a month before McArthur was caught.
“We follow the evidence, and the evidence is telling us that that’s not the case right now,” Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders told reporters in December 2017. “The evidence today tells us that there is not a serial killer.”
Rae, the former city councilor, said the resistance to believing there could be a serial killer reflected the city’s need to believe it was safe. “This is part of the culture of Toronto and Canada. We are, ‘Toronto the good.’ That can’t happen here. But this type of murder can happen here,” he said.
In January 2018, they arrested McArthur on two counts of murder. After months of sifting through remains buried at a property where he once worked, police charged him with eight counts of murder.
At the time of his plea, one of the detectives who helped gather evidence of McArthur’s crimes said he hoped it would provide closure for the families. “People wanted answers,” Detective David Dickinson, told reporters. “I’m hoping we brought some of those answers to them.”
The city, though, is not done asking questions. A recent editorial in the Toronto Star expressed hope that an independent review of the investigations could shed light on whether systemic bias played a role in how the disappearances were handled.
“Why did the police seemingly not take the concerns of the LGBTQ community more seriously?” the paper asked.
“Would police have taken more and swifter action if McArthur’s victims had not been gay or people of colour, homeless or addicted to drugs?” the editorial read.
“Answers to those questions are what the broader community still needs for any real closure in this case.”
Soros-founded university says it has been kicked out of Hungary as an autocrat tightens his grip
BERLIN — An American university established a quarter-century ago to educate a new generation of leaders and scholars after communism’s collapse in Central and Eastern Europe said Monday it has been kicked out of its home in Hungary.
The ejection marked one of the surest signals to date of autocracy’s return to the country, and the region, after decades of relative freedom. It is the first time a university has been forced out of an European Union nation.
Central European University has long been considered among the world’s finest graduate schools, attracting students from across the globe, and it is widely seen as the best in Hungary.
But the university, which was founded by Hungarian American financier George Soros, has also been the target for nearly two years of a right-wing government that has systematically consolidated control and marginalized dissent.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been particularly ruthless in attacking anything associated with Soros, whose open and liberal philosophy is the antithesis of the illiberal, nationalist and nativist view celebrated by Orban.
The university said Monday it was left with no choice but to move its primary campus to Vienna next year after Orban’s government refused to acknowledge an agreement that would enable the school to continue to admit new students in Budapest.
“Arbitrary eviction of a reputable university is a flagrant violation of academic freedom,” the university said in announcing the move. “It is a dark day for Europe and a dark day for Hungary.
The university, which has dual accreditation in Hungary and the United States, has enjoyed robust, bipartisan backing in Congress, where members expressed concern about the threat to academic freedom and the precedent of a U.S. institution being kicked out by an American ally.
Despite the Soros affiliation, CEU was also, for a time, even defended by the Trump administration. President Trump’s ambassador arrived in Budapest this summer on a mission, he said, to broker an agreement and keep CEU in the country.
But last week, after it became clear there would be no deal, Ambassador David B. Cornstein broke with previous U.S. policy on the matter. In an interview with The Washington Post, he refused to criticize Orban — whom he described as his “friend” — and pinned the blame on Soros, who he said had been insufficiently acquiescent to the government.
Cornstein — an 80-year-old New Yorker who made his fortune in the jewelry, gambling and telemarketing businesses and is a close friend of Trump’s — compared the university’s plight to his own experience selling jewelry at department stores.
“I was a guest in another guy’s store,” he said. “The university is in another country. It would pay to work with the government.”
He also minimized the university’s importance — comparing its 1,500 students unfavorably with what he described as much larger campuses at Ohio State and Michigan — and appeared baffled by why the school’s fate had generated wider interest.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom,” he said.
The government’s campaign against CEU began in early 2017, soon after Trump’s inauguration. Legislation passed that spring by the Hungarian parliament appeared to specifically target the university by requiring all foreign-based school to have academic programs in their home countries.
CEU created a program at Bard College, in New York, and it was certified by state authorities. But the Hungarian government did not acknowledge the arrangement, and last month government officials signaled that they never would.
With the legislation set to take effect on Jan. 1, university leaders said they were forced to shift to Vienna to continue admitting new students.
“The government has done an injustice toward its own citizens, the hundreds of Hungarians who work and study at CEU, and thousands of Hungarian alumni and their families,” said Michael Ignatieff, the university’s president, in a statement released Monday.
Hungarian government officials have said the university has not complied with all aspects of the law, though they have declined to spell out publicly exactly how.
Zoltan Kovacs, a senior Hungarian official, said in an interview that he believes the university’s decision to move is a bluff and that it will ultimately back down.
“CEU is going to remain,” said Kovacs, who is a CEU alumnus.
Outside the Hungarian Parliament last week, students staged a last-ditch attempt to force the government to change its mind. They erected white canvas tents, and held a “teach-in” in which professors conducted their classes round-the-clock in the freezing cold of late fall in Hungary.
Zalan Jakab, a 23-year-old Hungarian who was among the students taking part, said in his home region, the vast majority of people hear little about the university beyond government propaganda and regard CEU “as an evil place.”
The protest, he said, was designed to show the public the true face of a school that is “the top of the league in Hungary in terms of educational quality.”
Ultimately, though, it was not enough to make a difference in the university’s fate.
“It’s a big loss,” said Jakab, who is studying political science. “I feel ashamed that my government has done this.”
Article via The Washington Post