Someone is recruiting Canadian teenagers on encrypted apps, handing them American handguns, and paying them to shoot synagogues and foreign consulates in Toronto. One police officer is dead. And authorities still won't say exactly who is footing the bill.
Teens with Guns, a Foreign Paymaster, and a Dead Cop
Here's the situation as Toronto police have laid it out. A string of shootings has rocked Canada's largest city, targeting synagogues, Jewish schools, and the US consulate. The suspected gunmen are teenagers, recruited through encrypted messaging apps by someone who paid them to pull the trigger and, according to officials, required them to film the attacks as proof of completion before receiving payment.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw told reporters the case fits a "broader pattern" of hired criminals carrying out coordinated attacks across the city. "It is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including in the Jewish community," he said. That is as close to an understatement as you will find in a police press conference.
The cost of investigating this mess has already been paid in blood. Constable Marc Pinizzotto, a Toronto police officer, was killed last week during a raid on an apartment complex linked to the US consulate attack. He was executing a search warrant. He did not come home.
A 19-Year-Old at the Airport and an Iraqi Commander in US Custody
Police arrested 19-year-old Zara Jabbi at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Thursday, linking him to the shooting outside the US consulate back in March. According to the BBC, Jabbi appeared in court shortly after his arrest and faces charges including theft, possession of a restricted firearm, and attacking an internationally protected premises. He is one of several suspects aged 18 and 19 taken into custody in connection with the broader shooting spree.
Meanwhile, across the border, US officials last month arrested Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi national alleged to be a commander in Kataib Hezbollah. That is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization operating in Iraq with documented ties to Iran. American prosecutors have charged al-Saadi with planning more than a dozen attacks targeting Jewish institutions and US interests across North America and Europe, including the consulate shooting in Toronto.
Toronto police have not confirmed whether al-Saadi is directly connected to their investigation. His lawyer has called the case a "political prosecution." Sure.
Who Is Paying for This? Great Question.
Canada's Secretary of State for Combating Crime, Ruby Sahota, stood up in the House of Commons and said those behind the shootings were "paid and hired by a foreign entity." That is a cabinet minister, in parliament, saying a foreign government or organization is contracting out political violence on Canadian soil.
Chief Demkiw, asked directly who was behind the payments, gave the most honest answer available: "Who's paying for this? This is what we are trying to determine." Toronto police are working the case alongside the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI. US-sourced handguns recovered in the raids were believed to have been used across dozens of the shootings, which raises its own set of uncomfortable questions about weapons trafficking across the border.
The surveillance footage from the consulate attack shows the suspects allegedly filming themselves mid-operation, proof-of-work for whoever was cutting the checks. This is not disorganized street crime. This is logistics.
The Jewish Community Is Being Targeted. That Is the Point.
Demkiw was explicit about the intent. The synagogues and Jewish schools were not random targets caught in wider chaos. Someone chose them. Someone paid for them to be chosen. The goal, according to the police chief, was to manufacture fear inside the Jewish community specifically.
This is happening in Toronto, Canada, in 2026. Teenagers are being recruited online and handed guns to terrorize Jewish institutions, allegedly on behalf of a foreign power with ties to a US-designated terrorist group. The BBC reports that authorities believe the gunmen were found through encrypted messaging applications, which means the recruitment pipeline has effectively no friction and leaves minimal trace.
Let that sit for a second.
The Dingo Take
There is a version of this story where it gets buried under the daily avalanche of noise, where it becomes a footnote in a weekly news digest, where people vaguely register that "something happened in Canada" and move on. That cannot happen here. A foreign entity, almost certainly state-linked given the scale and coordination, is running what amounts to a mercenary program targeting Jewish communities in a G7 country. They are using encrypted apps to find desperate or radicalized teenagers, paying them in cash or crypto, and pointing them at synagogues. One Canadian police officer is already dead.
The al-Saadi connection, if it holds, points directly toward Kataib Hezbollah and, through them, toward Iran. That would make this state-sponsored antisemitic terrorism operating inside North America with locally recruited gunmen. The US and Canadian governments need to say that out loud, clearly, without the usual diplomatic gauze wrapped around it. Sahota used the phrase "foreign entity" in parliament. That is a start. It is not enough.
The teenagers pulled into this are also victims of a kind, groomed online by people who knew exactly how to find young men with nothing to lose and everything to prove. That does not excuse what they did. It does mean the recruitment pipeline itself is the target that matters most right now, and encrypted apps used to hire children to shoot up synagogues probably deserve a different level of policy urgency than they are currently receiving.
