I kept quiet about the recent Toronto mass shooting attack as I did not want to call this as an attack by a Muslim until I could be sure that was the case. But like many other,s I suspected that the person behind this horrific attack would be a Muslim. The suspicions of myself and others have had as to the identity of the attacker have been confirmed by police statements about the attacker who fired into restaurants in the Greektown area of the city killing two people and injuring thirteen.

The gunman, Faisal Hussain aged 29, fired indiscriminately into the restaurants and cafés and killed a ten year old girl and an 18 year old student. Hussain died in a subsequent gun battle with police but it is not sure at present whether Hussain died because of a police bullet or whether he turned the gun on himself.

The police in Toronto are not speculating on a motive for the attack but Hussain’s family say that he was suffering from severe mental illness for a large part of his life. I must say that reading between the lines of what has been reported of the family’s statement gives me reason to believe that Hussain was suffering from some form of mental illness. There’s enough detail given about Hussain’s mental health condition to show that he was sick with depression and psychosis. This information is enough for journalists and the police authorities to check what the family are saying and if it is true. Another reason for giving credence to the family’s statement is that there is also detail present in this statement that is absent in those stories about Muslim killers in Europe. In Europe the the bland catch-all description of ‘mentally ill’ is used by the police and other authorities to describe them and there is rarely such a detailed statement from the relatives about the killer’s background.

More information about Hussain’s motivation may come when Hussain’s home and property is searched by police but we should not automatically dismiss the prospect that there may be some jihad element in this attack. One possible scenario that should in my opinion be considered is that that Hussain and his mental illness problems may have come to the attention of Islamic radicals in Canada. These radicals could have then played on Hussain’s fears and delusions or offered him a way out of his mental distress via jihad to such an extent that he went and carried out this awful attack. The other side of the coin is that here we have a man who was not a terrorist but instead was a sad and damaged man who completely lost touch with reality and control over himself and because of that killed random people. The Toronto police are, according to Rebel Media, looking at every avenue to establish a motive including Islamic terrorism. Hussain may have killed because he was suffering from catastrophic mental illness or because he was a jihadi or a combination of the two reasons.

Some groups, such as the right wing Jewish Defence League in Canada are claiming that this is terrorism on the grounds that Hussain was, as the JDL assert, from the Thorncliffe Park area of Toronto that the JDL claim is a hotbed of Islamic radicalisation. A brief drill down into the demographics of the Thorncliffe Park area does show that 80% of the residents are Muslim and this is very similar demographics to some of the areas in Britain, such as Dewsbury, which have produced dangerous terrorists and which contains radical mosques. It’s possible that Hussain could have been influenced by the violently separatist Islamic culture that may exist in Thorncliffe Park. However the JDL is questioning the veracity of the family’s statement and said that this statement was designed to detract attention from the problems of Jihad within Islam. It would be helpful to know who wrote this statement and when it was prepared. As I said I’m prepared to accept the family’s statement about mental illness but Hussain’s mental condition may not be the entire motivation behind this attack.

Although I accept at this stage the statement of Hussain’s family that he was suffering from mental illness, this may not be the whole story. It is not beyond the bounds of probability that Hussain was targeted by Jihadi recruiters because of his psychological vulnerabilities. There’s an interesting thesis that has been submitted by Zara Akbar, a student at Huddersfield University that although taking the ‘someone else’s fault’ line of blaming ‘Islamophobia’ for the social and cultural isolation of Muslims does concede that some Muslims seeking a sense of belonging turn to Islamic extremism. This need for a sense of belonging or succour for his mental distress may have led Hussain to commit this terrible crime.

It will be interesting to see what turns up when the police start to examine in more detail the background of this killer. Will he turn out to be just a deluded and damaged individual who saw shooting up a restaurant as a way out of his problems, or is there are religious motive behind it? Only time will tell on this.