At 2:30 p.m., Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the Canadian Parliament.
“We will continue to be engaged, we will provide updates. The update I can give right now is there are four border crossings that are right now closed, Rainbow Bridge, Whirlpool Bridge, Queenston Bridge and Peace Bridge. Additional measures are being contemplated and activated at all border crossings across the country. We are taking this extraordinarily seriously,” Trudeau said.
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U.S. President Joe Biden has also been briefed on the explosion, according to The Guardian. The vehicle reportedly was coming from Canada into the U.S. when it was flagged for a secondary inspection by border officials. At this point, the car rapidly accelerated and drove through a fence and onto the bridge plaza, then drove towards the inspection lanes, hit a structure and exploded, according to the Niagara Gazette. The two men inside the vehicle were killed, and a border patrol official was injured.
Fox News called the explosion an attempted “terrorist attack” according to Reuters. Other outlets, however, including CNN, have said that it’s unclear whether or not it was an attack, an accident or a medical emergency that caused the acceleration. It is also unclear if there was an explosive device or if the car exploded on impact.
“Those bomb technicians are an absolutely essential part of this response. And they should be able to tell pretty quickly whether or not there was an explosive device in that vehicle. If the answer is no, and this is entirely the result of either unintentional or an inadvertent vehicle crash, that’ll tell us how quickly they’ll be able to restore service to that side of the bridge,” Andy McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, said on CNN.
Josh Campbell, CNN’s Security Correspondent, also pointed out that if the explosion is a terrorist attack, it doesn’t look like other terrorist attacks.
“Yeah, I’m just not seeing it,” Campbell said. “Most terrorists … their intent is to cause you know, mass loss of life as much loss of life as they can. And so just the very nature of that you have two individuals who are in a vehicle at the same time, that’s unusual. I mean, typically if you have you know, two terrorists, for example, they would select different targets and work to try to maximize the harm.”
McCabe agreed with Campbell that what happened was “something that really any car could do,” regardless of whether or not it had explosives.
“I think there’s a lot of circumstances that point in that same direction, as Josh Campbell was saying just few minutes ago, from what we know about terrorist operatives, and the way that they stage attacks. If you had a vehicle that was … loaded with explosives that you intended to detonate, you wouldn’t crash the car and then detonate the explosives. You’d wait, you take the car in an unobtrusive way, unremarkable way, as close as you could possibly get to the target and then you would intentionally detonate it, and that doesn’t seem to be that doesn’t fit the circumstances that we’re aware of so far.”
However, McCabe also said that it wasn’t a sure thing that the explosion wasn’t an attack.
“It starts to look more like trying to potentially, you know, two people trying to essentially push their way across the border because they’re afraid of getting stopped if they tried it in the lawful way,” McCabe said. “But we can’t rule out the fact … that this could have been two people trying to make some sort of a statement that ended up unfortunately in a life-taking way for themselves.”
