Ann Hui Staff Reporter
Saturday, April 24, 2010
According to Fort McMurray RCMP, officers responded to an anonymous call for help at about 5:30 a.m. Thursday morning. When they arrived at the downtown address, they found the body of a man dead in an apartment.
Officers immediately began treating the investigation as a homicide.
RCMP have not released the identity of the man, though friends of the family identified him Friday as Abdinasir Ali.
Mohamed Gilao, who knows the Ali family through his work as executive director with Dejinta Beesha, a community organization that assists immigrants with resettlement, said that the Ali family lived in St. Jamestown and immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s.
“His mother, his father, we are all devastated,” he said.
Abdinasir’s mother works as a personal support worker, Gilao said, and his father as a cab driver.
According to Gilao, Abdinasir moved to Fort McMurray in the summer of last year after he’d been told that he would be able to find a job in Alberta’s booming oil economy. Once there, however, Gilao believes Abdinasir may have become involved with criminal activity.
“They go there to get a job and once they’re there, they cannot get jobs. Then, they go into the hands of criminals,” he said. “They’re brain-washed.”
Last month, the Star revealed that since the summer of 2005, at least 29 Somali-Canadian men from Ontario have already been killed in Alberta, many of them over drug or gang-related disputes.
“It’s a disease,” Gilao said. “He was a nice kid. He was very social, and full of life.”
Source: Toronto Star