Funeral prayer of Muslim family offered amid grief and mourning in Canada

A public funeral service was held on Saturday for the Afzaal family members, who were hit by a driver as they waited at a street corner in London, about 200km (124 miles) southwest of Toronto, last weekend.

Salman Afzaal, 46, his wife Madiha, 44, their 15-year-old daughter Yumna, and Salman’s mother, Talat, 74, were killed when the driver ran them over in a pick-up truck at about 8:40pm local time on Sunday (00:40 GMT on Monday). The couple’s nine-year-old son was taken to hospital with serious injuries.

Police said the family was targeted “because of their Islamic faith”.

Mourners rolled four caskets draped in Canadian flags to the front of the public funeral ceremony on Saturday afternoon, which was followed by a communal prayer. A private funeral service for family and friends will be held later in the day.

“It’s beyond words,” Ed Holder, the mayor of London, told CBC News before the ceremony began. “This is too heartbreaking, to see three generations of a family just wiped out like that. We’re trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.”

Raza Bashir Tarar, high commissioner for Pakistan to Canada, said during Saturday’s service that the entire nation of Pakistan – where the Afzaal family was originally from – “stands shoulder-to-shoulder with you in this hour of grief, in this time when our hearts are bleeding because of the atrocity that has befallen this wonderful, marvelous family”.

The attack has spurred widespread grief in Muslim communities across Canada, which are still reeling from a deadly shooting at a Quebec City mosque in 2017 – as well as fuelled calls for concrete action to root out anti-Muslim hate and Islamophobia.

Nathaniel Veltman, 20, has been arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder, as well as one count of attempted murder.

Call for action

The National Council of Canadian Muslims, a national advocacy group, in an open letter this week called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to host a National Action Summit on Islamophobia “to chart a path forward for Canada in ending violence against Muslims”.

“The summit is a start. The outcome of the summit, in terms of concrete policy, will be the test of whether all governments and political parties are truly committed to preventing further loss of life,” reads the letter, which has been endorsed by dozens of faith-based and civil society groups.