VANCOUVER — Two men and a teenager labelled "suspicious" because they were taking photos of a Vancouver mall feared being attacked on the street after local media published their images, says their doctor.
Mohammed Sharaz, One of the three people who raised security alarm bells, "I bought my son a little phone he brought with him just to take pictures of anything he can remember, take it back home and show his family and his friends.”
"My friend, when he looks at anything head on, he doesn't see like me and you do. So he'll take a picture or a movie and then later on when he gets back he zooms into it and he watches stuff," said Sharaz. "He takes pictures of anything and everything."
Sharaz said he had no issues with how police treated the situation. What concerned him more was that the information had been leaked, potentially putting him, his son and his friend at risk of harm from vigilantes.
He said the three have stayed inside since they found out the photo of the three of them was circulating on social media and the internet.
"My son's got a disability. My friend's got a disability. We're the last people who are going to be hired by some terrorist organization to take video of stuff," he said.
Dr. Weidong Yu from the Wellspring Clinic for Holistic Medicine confirmed that two of the men are his patients.
Dr. Weidong Yu of the Wellspring Clinic for Holistic Medicine says the trio are visiting from Manchester, England, so that two of them — a teenager and a young adult — can be treated at his clinic for a visual disability.
He says they suffer from a disorder that causes blurry vision, and they take lots of photos in order to zoom in on them later and see the sights more clearly.
Yu says the trio were frightened of public attacks after online news outlet Vancity Buzz published on Thursday night leaked surveillance images of them at Pacific Centre mall.
But he says they trusted Vancouver police and called them Friday morning from his clinic, where officers attended and conducted interviews in a "trained and professional" manner.
Police say an internal memo, which labelled the men "suspicious" and included the surveillance photos, was never intended to be public and that after speaking with the trio they're confident their actions were "completely innocent."
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