Chicken Land Murder – Religiously Motivated Hate Crime or Random Killing?

Back on May 29th, 25-year-old Naim Akl was brutally murdered; gunned down in his family’s restaurant, ‘Chickenland’ in Mississauga, Ontario. 

While no one else was killed, several of the victim’s family were injured in the shooting; his father, mother, and two brothers. The victim’s younger sister was also in the restaurant at the time of the shooting although she was uninjured in the incident. 

Three men thus far have been arrested in connection with the murder; 31-year-old Naqash Abbasi, 25-year-old Suliman Raza, and 20-year-old Anand Nath, and all have been charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder with a firearm.

While his other family members were injured in the shooting, by all appearances the main target of the shooting was the young man, Naim Akl. 

Nothing concrete has been submitted to the public about the motive of the killers, however, it is possible we are looking at a case of religiously targeted violence. 

While those charged Akl’s killing: Naqash Abbasi, Suliman Raza, and Anand Nath, were all young Muslims, the Akl family is in fact part of the Druze religious group. While closely related to Islam, the Druze faith is frequently seen as a separate offshoot, and a different religion entirely, Druze is thought of as a religious/ethnic group, with most practitioners located in the modern-day states of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. 

Most likely with less than 2 million worldwide, the Druze are a notably small group, and although has a complex historical relationship with the mostly Muslim countries they’ve lived in over the centuries, and frequently throughout history the Druze have found themselves persecuted by different Islamic societies in the region. 

To be clear: it is total speculation that the Naim Akl was targeted for his faith, that being said it would fall into a pattern of recent, religiously targeted attacks going on in Canada, for example, the recently car-ramming mass murder of a Muslim family in London, ON. Additionally, the recent string of burning Catholic churches in British Columbia after the discovery of the 215 killed native children at a former residential school in that province. 

While those previously mentioned incidents gained much more press coverage, and logically so due to the greater scale of the catastrophes in those instances, in the future we may find that the killing of Naim Akl falls into this ugly pattern we see developing in Canada of religious groups being targeted for violence. 

It is also a much harder type of crime for police to crack down on due to potential religious or hate-based motivations behind the violence. The perpetrators aren’t looking to make some easy money rather they have an ideological investment in doing harm to members of a specific subgroup.

It hasn’t helped that the Trudeau Liberal government and other provincial governments have had such a focus on dividing Canadians along racial and religious lines which over time trains people to see people outside of their specific subgroup, not as a fellow Canadian, but rather an opponent competing for territory and influence in Canada.