Report: beheader is “Chinese Muslim motivated by Koran”

(But is the report true? Below, I express doubts about the authencity of the CBC’s putative statement about the killer.)

James B. wrote to me a half hour ago:

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at one point said the following:

“RCMP announced Friday morning that they have charged Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton with second-degree murder. He is scheduled to appear at the Manitoba provincial court in Portage la Prairie. A Chinese Muslim, Li expressed to investigators that his actions were motivated by the Koran.”

That has since been deleted from the site. Canadian blogs have made copies of it for posterity. Here is the sanitized version of the CBC story without the Muslim reference.

If this is true, then my controversial guess posted 8:41 a.m. Friday morning that the killer was Muslim (followed by my theory that the Canadian authorities were covering up his Muslim status in order to prevent a mass anti-Muslim reaction) was accurate. But we don’t know that it’s true. I gather James B. picked this up from a blog, not from the original CBC story. I googled the sentence about Li being a Muslim and got this result. It was to three pages. One page won’t load and the other two show the sentence about Li but have no further information or source, they’re just chaotic, meaningless webpages. I found nothing stating that the sentence was originally part of a CBC article.

Of course it’s also possible that the CBC initially posted that sentence, and then took it down because it wasn’t accurate. The deletion, if it is a deletion, is not necessarily sinister.

The CBC’s story linked above is worth looking at. It has good pictures of Timothy McLean, showing for the first time the American-Indian (Native Canadian? Aboriginal?) cast of his features, though I would say he’s about half Caucasian, not all Indian. That helps address the question of his race which has been raised. (Shocking announcement for liberals! Normal people are interested in people’s race, because their race is part of what people are. What is not normal is to have no interest in people’s race.) And the picture of McL ean with a friend’s baby is very touching.

The article has a small photo of Li. He is dark, bullet-headed and strong-looking. There is some information about his work history.

UPDATE: At this webpage, I find this comment which includes the sentence James B. sent me:

Posted by: CBC News Aug 1 2008, 10:53 AM

RCMP announced Friday morning that they have charged Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton with second-degree murder. He is scheduled to appear at the Manitoba provincial court in Portage la Prairie. A Chinese Muslim, Li expressed to investigators that his actions were motivated by the Koran.

No explanation is given. Also, what does it mean that CBC News is the party that posted the comment, rather than an individual?

More and more, when I look at that sentence, “A Chinese Muslim, Li expressed to investigators that his actions were motivated by the Koran,” it strikes me as too pat, especially given the absence of any reference in the media to anything else of substance that Li has said to police. That’s not to say that Li is not a Muslim, I don’t know if he is or not. But the quotation doesn’t quite feel legitimate to me. Until that quotation or something like it is connected to a real news story, I’m not accepting it as true.

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Barbara V. writes:

You are such a fair person.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 02, 2008 01:18 AM | Send