Canada: Canadian police were yesterday investigating the murders of eight men whose bodies were left in a remote wooded area on a farmer's property.
Police disclosed few details about the deaths at the farm in the eastern Canadian province of Ontario, about 32km ( 20 miles) southwest of the city of London, except to say that four vehicles were involved, including a tow truck, and that the dead were all men. The bodies were found on Saturday morning.
"We are confident that all the victims were known to each other and were from the greater Toronto area," said Det Supt Ross Bingley of the Ontario provincial police. The bodies have been removed from the crime scene and await postmortems.
Bingley said the victims have not been identified and he refused to speculate about the possible cause of death.
"Obviously, we're not used to having eight people at one homicide scene," Det Bingley said. "In 27 years of policing, I don't recall that number of people at any one location, so obviously it's fairly significant." Police found the bodies after a call from the property owner, who is not considered a suspect. They have so far refused to discuss any possible links to organised crime, although surrounding Elgin County has a history of biker activity.
On Saturday, an aerial view showed the vehicles parked within 200 yards of each other, the bodies still inside. One body was clearly visible, lying curled on its side in the boot of the jeep.
About 100 yards away, the tow truck was found parked with a Volkswagen hooked to the back.
Mary and Russell Steele, who own the property around which the cars were parked, said that the vehicles were not there when they took the road home on Friday at around 8.30pm.
They called police on Saturday morning after looking inside one of the vehicles and not being able to see anything because of a blanket covering the back window. "We didn't see anybody in them, so we just phoned the cops with the licence plate numbers," Mr Steele said. "The police opened the back and I could see forms," his wife said. "I couldn't tell, but immediately in my mind I thought, 'these are bodies'."
This is not the first time there has been violent crime in the isolated area. In separate incidents in 1994 and 1998, the bodies of a man and a woman were found dumped in fields. Both had been beaten to death and neither of the murders were ever solved. In October 1999 there was a shoot-out on nearby Highway 401, apparently the result of a gang rift.
- (AP)