EXCLUSIVE: Global Affairs reveals countries where Canadians are most often murdered
Global News
More Canadians are murdered in Mexico than in any other country.
For the first time, Canada has released a full country-by-country list of Canadians murdered abroad.
Over the last five years, almost 200 Canadians have been murdered while travelling outside the country — cases ranging from drug-related shootings to extortion kidnappings and the opportunist killings of innocent tourists drawn to the seductive tropics.
More Canadians are murdered in Mexico than in any other country. The potential dangers were illustrated as recently as last week on Mexico’s Caribbean coast near Cancun. Tourists ran for cover from gunfire when commandoes wearing ski masks arrived by boat and assassinated two men from a rival drug gang.
Until now, Global Affairs Canada has cited the privacy of the victims, insisting that the public had no right to information on the specific countries in which all these crimes occurred.
Following a successful access-to-information appeal to the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, the federal government has changed its position.
Global News is the first to release this new data.
Canada now accepts that the public does, in fact, have a right to the information. Simply releasing the fact that a Canadian has been murdered in a specific country does not identify the victim.
From the initial access-to-information request, it took well over two years before the information was recently released.