Montreal, Canada - No Progress in Search for Jewish School Firebomber

Montreal, Canada - The perpetrator of a Molotov-cocktail attack on the chassidic boys’ school in Montreal, remains at large despite the act having been videotaped by the school’s surveillance camera and despite a $5,000 reward offered by an anonymous donor for information leading to his arrest.

The images released by police show, from an angle, a masked black-haired man, seemingly in his 20s and apparently alone, wearing a beige top and beige pants reaching to below the knees. He is seen lighting an accelerant and throwing it through a glass panel of the main entrance of the Skver community’s Toldos Yakov Yosef school in the city’s Outremont neighbourhood shortly after midnight on Saturday, Sept. 2. In the last frame, he removes his hood-like mask as he flees.

School and Jewish community officials said last week that they’re confident and grateful police are putting the necessary resources into their investigation.
But the community and police, differ on the motivation for the crime. Police have so far not labelled the incident a hate crime, because of the absence of evidence such as graffiti or phone calls, and are treating it as arson. But Canadian Jewish leaders are convinced the perpetrator deliberately targeted a Jewish institution. No one was in the school at the time. About a dozen teenaged students had left the building only about 20 minutes beforehand.