TORONTO - Nearly 2,000 members of Toronto’s Somali community gathered in a west-end mosque Tuesday for funeral services for the 18-year-old victim of a shooting for which police acknowledge they still cannot find a motive.

Abdikarim Ahmed Abdikarim died Thursday after a gunman fired repeatedly into a group of young men outside a housing complex.

“This is a tragedy what happened to this young man . . . this is a tragedy for the whole community and for the whole city, I believe,” said Mohamed Targooye, a friend of the Abdikarim family. “The people who did this have to surrender . . . and anybody who has knowledge about who did this, they have to tell the police. Don’t hide them.”

Police released a chilling videotape of the shooting Monday, showing the young gunman walking calmly up to Abdikarim and his friends outside an apartment block and without warning, begin firing wildly.

Pall bearers carried Abdikarim’s plain, particle-board coffin out of the Khalid Bin Walid mosque in a suburban Toronto industrial park, surrounded by a crowd of mourners so large they could not all fit into the expansive facility, a converted warehouse.

The message delivered during the service was in large part aimed at the many young Somali-Canadians in attendance.

“You should not take arms, you should not take revenge on these people. In fact, the best revenge is to not take revenge,” said Mohamed Ali Rashid. “There should be no vengeance, they should be calm and let the police do their work.”

Det. Sgt. Brian Borg, of the homicide squad, said there have been hundreds of responses to the tape, which was released to the media and posted on the Internet video-sharing site You Tube. He said it is too early to tell if the tape, taken from two surveillance cameras around the Lawrence Heights apartment and townhouse complex, has led to an identification of the gunman.

But he said he is confident that someone will recognize the young man in baggy jeans, jacket and baseball cap. “The investigation is progressing well, we’re making progress.”

But he acknowledged the motive for the shooting remains unclear. “We’re looking at all the possibilities, we haven’t ruled anything out.”

The teen’s father, Ahmed Abdikarim, said little to reporters as he walked into the memorial service, but a friend said the family was disturbed by the video. “He was shaking when he saw it,” Abdi Warsami said after the service. “Any father would be angry watching that video: it was so cold-blooded.”

He said the Abdikarim family had nothing but praise for the police and was “praying for justice” for their son’s killer.

But we need a change here in Toronto: this has got to stop, this senseless violence,” he said. “This is not Iraq; this is not Somalia. I mean, we left Somalia because of the war.”

National Post

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