The police in Canada’s capital have arrested a man after the authorities at the University of Ottawa put the campus in lockdown late on Friday afternoon in response to what had been originally reported as a “violent incident.”
The university told students to avoid campus shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern time and urged those on the premises to hide, and if confronted by a “violent attacker,” to defend themselves “by any means necessary until you can get away.”
But the police said their investigation was more mundane than the threat relayed in the campus’s security alert.
“There was no violence,” said Inspector Brian Samuel of the Ottawa Police Service. The police were called by security to a nearby shopping mall at 4:20 p.m. after a man was reported acting suspiciously. The man made his way onto the campus and into the transit station on campus.
The police tracked the man using CCTV camera footage, but said the incident didn’t start or end on the campus and would not confirm if the man was armed or not. There were no injuries.
He has been arrested and is in custody. Charges are pending.
Alexandre Giroux, a student in the criminology program at the University of Ottawa, said he was locked into his classroom, where he was attending an English lecture, for about two hours.
“It took a little bit for people to take it seriously,” Mr. Giroux said. “We didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know if it was a test or something.”
He added, “We did decide just in case we’re going to shut the lights off, close the blinds, and then we got nothing. We’re like, yeah, we should probably take this seriously. It did take us a little bit to really go, OK, hide.”
Inspector Samuel added that false or exaggerated reports of what was actually happening circulated on social media and that it was the University of Ottawa’s decision to lock down the campus.
The lockdown at the university campus, which is in central Ottawa close to government buildings, was lifted shortly before 7 p.m.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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