A Canadian man who used a machete to murder a Toronto massage parlour employee has been sentenced to life in prison for a killing the judge deemed to be an act of terrorism motivated by the online “incel” subculture.
The man cannot be named because he was 17 at the time of the February 2020 attack in which he killed Ashley Noelle Arzaga, 24, and seriously wounded another woman identified only by the initials JC.
He pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder in July, when justice Sukhail Akhtar found the attack, with its links to the “incel” ideology, amounted to an act of terrorism.
On Tuesday, Akhtar told the court that sentencing the man as a youth would be “insufficient” to the task of pursuing accountability.
The judge rejected the claim the man had been “brainwashed” by the incel movement. “He sought it out, he accepted it and he acted upon it,” the judge said.
Incels – virtually all of whom are male – are self-described “involuntary celibates”, who subscribe to an ideology that the world is unjustly stacked against unattractive heterosexual men.
In recent years, a spike in killings in Canada and the US associated with the movement have led to greater scrutiny from law enforcement and security experts.
The decision by prosecutors to pursue terrorism charges against the minor, the first for an act of violence not tied to any religious ideology, highlights the growing concern among officials.
Authorities have so far been wary of deploying terrorism-related charges in similar cases – even in the case of Alek Minassian, the Toronto man who killed 10 pedestrians and wounded 14 others when he plowed a delivery van on to a crowded sidewalk.
At a hearing last month, the man apologized to Arzaga’s family and friends, and to the surviving victim, adding that he has changed and no longer hates women.
Because the massage parlour attacker was nearly 18 years old, prosecutors wanted the judge to sentence him as an adult. They also pointed to the careful planning and research into the the attack that reflected adult thoughts and actions.
In Canada, adults guilty of first-degree murder face an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years. The defense had requested the attacker have his parole ineligibility limited to 10 years because of his age at the time of the murder.
In addition to a sentence of life in prison with a chance of parole at 10 years, the man was also was sentenced to three years for attempted murder of another employee of the massage parlour.
