Darpan News Desk The Canadian Press, 03 Nov, 2023 09:44 AM
Mounties in North Vancouver say officers arrested four people and seized large amounts of illicit marijuana and psilocybin -- also known as magic mushrooms --following a report of a kidnapping at a warehouse earlier this week.
The R-C-M-P say they received a report that a man was being held at the warehouse after being kidnapped at gunpoint Tuesday afternoon.
They say the warehouse appeared to have been the site of a drug-trafficking lab where drugs were stored and packaged to be shipped and sold on the streets -- but the investigation so far hasn't yielded any evidence pointing to a kidnapping.
A statement from Constable Mansoor Sahak says police believe the kidnapping report was a so-called "false flag" aimed at targeting the lab.
A man who held up a bank in Kelowna and fled with more than 40-thousand-dollars in cash has been sentenced to four years in prison. Alan Stuart Metcalfe was sentenced in August after pleading guilty to one count of robbery, and the decision was released online this week.
The Mounties say police and firefighters responded Wednesday evening to a report of a structure fire on a vacant property along Gunn Avenue and found several buildings on fire, with indications that the blazes had been set intentionally. They say police responded to flames on a different property along the same road yesterday and again found they appeared to have been sparked intentionally.
COVID-19 cases are on the rise in British Columbia, with the BC Centre for Disease Control reporting hospitalizations have increased 58 per cent in the past two weeks. The centre says in its latest update that deaths due to COVID-19 are also trending upwards, with 24 fatalities in the last week of September, compared to nine in the second week of August.
The count by the Homelessness Services Association of B-C was done on March 7th and 8th -- and identified just under five thousand people in 11 communities, up from the roughly 36-hundred identified in the March 2020 count.
Business leaders in Surrey are pleading with the province to provide a clear plan as the city grapples with the next stage of implementing a new police force. The Surrey Board of Trade has sent a letter to Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth saying the city needs a solid policing strategy with adequate wraparound support services and infrastructure as it juggles the costs of the outgoing R-C-M-P and incoming Surrey Police Service.
British Columbia is setting out new rules as it attempts to navigate a way to curb the overdose crisis with drug decriminalization. Possession of small amounts of many illicit drugs was decriminalized in B.C. in January after the federal government issued an exemption, but legislation introduced by the province today would make their use illegal in many public spaces.
