Tuesday, August 16, 2016
By Megan Gillis
Toronto Black Lives Matter activists shut down a busy Toronto intersection Monday morning for a news conference demanding justice for Ottawa man Abdirahman Abdi, who died after an altercation with police last month.
The activists briefly took over the intersection of Yonge and Dundas streets to erect a banner and make a series of demands they said were in conjunction with a diverse coalition of Somali community leaders and organizers.
Hashim Yusuf, a Black Lives Matter-Toronto organizer, argued that, “Brother Adirahman Abdi was executed in public by the bare hands” of the arresting officer and that police must be held accountable for “gross power abuse.”
A Special Investigations Unit probe into the incident is ongoing. The SIU is a civilian police watchdog that investigates incidents involving civilians and police resulting in serious injury, death or allegations of sexual assault.
Toronto activists also took aim at the SIU and hospital officials, who they allege withheld news of the 37-year-old’s death for more than 24 hours.
Among their demands were a call for charges against the two officers involved in the incident, which happened after Abdi was reported to be groping a woman in a Hintonburg coffee shop, and that the SIU release its full report into Abdi’s death.
They want the SIU to collect and release any and all race-based data and for Attorney General Yasir Naqvi to launch an investigation into police encounters with people with disabilities, including autism.