Report: Canada Raised Terror Threat Level 'A Few Days Ago'

NBC Justice Correspondent Pete Williams reported that Canada raised its terror threat level without a public announcement a few days prior to the shootings in Ottawa during MSNBC’s coverage of the event on Wednesday.

“For the past really two weeks, there’s been increased concern among Canadian officials. Some of it expressed publicly, some not. The terror threat level, which is not a public system like we have in the US was raised up a notch in Canada a few days ago. There was no public announcement of that” he said.

Williams added, “Canadian officials were worried that there would be these sort of, if you’ll pardon the expression, low-tech attacks, using guns or knives or in the case of what happened, apparently in Montreal two days ago, a car, to attack government facilities, soldiers. And so there was concern they would attack either Canadian or US targets within Canada. So, that may be another reason why the US embassy in Canada is also on lockdown. But, they’ve been following almost 100 people in Canada with what they consider to be jihadist sympathies, people who had tried to go to Syria or had succeeded and come back. They had a lot of people under surveillance, they were hearing a lot of this chatter. Things were reaching a pitch, they thought.”

Later in the broadcast anchor Andrea Mitchell stated that Canadian police confirmed multiple gunmen were involved in the attack, so far, the attackers have not been identified and no motive has been ascribed to the attacks.

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