A 37-year-old Toronto man has been charged with uttering threats and intimidation following an alleged hate-motivated incident in Scarborough, after police say he sent an email threatening violence against members of the Muslim community.

According to Toronto Police Service, the incident began on July 17, when the accused became involved in an argument with another individual in the area of Orton Park Road and Brimorton Drive. Following that confrontation, investigators allege, the man sent the other person an email containing explicit threats of violence directed at members of the Muslim community. Police say the victim was targeted specifically because of their Muslim faith.

Arrest and Charges

Rohoman Leo Drepaul, 37, of Toronto, was subsequently arrested and charged with uttering threats and intimidation. The charges have not been tested in court. Drepaul was scheduled to appear before a bail court on July 20.

Toronto police have characterized the investigation as hate-motivated, a designation that reflects the alleged targeting of an individual on the basis of religious identity — a protected ground under both the Criminal Code of Canada and the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Investigation Ongoing

The investigation remains active. Toronto Police are asking anyone with additional information to contact investigators directly at 416-808-3505, or to reach out anonymously through Crime Stoppers.

The Ontario government is describing the province’s wildfire situation as moving in a “reassuring direction,” with 80 fires extinguished over the past two weeks — a development officials attribute to cooler temperatures and timely precipitation. But the relief is fragile. As of Thursday, 159 fires continue to burn across northern Ontario, 30 of them classified as out of control, and a fresh heat warning covering large parts of the northwest threatens to reverse recent gains. Environment Canada is forecasting daytime highs of 28 to 30 degrees Celsius northwest of Thunder Bay, with humidex values climbing to 38, and a severe thunderstorm warning adds further unpredictability to an already volatile situation.

Fourteen communities have been evacuated across northern Ontario, according to Emergency Preparedness and Response Minister Jill Dunlop, and while five have since been cleared to return, approximately 2,000 people remain displaced and sheltering in host communities elsewhere in the province. The human cost of this fire season has been significant. Personnel and aircraft from Alberta, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Yukon and Prince Edward Island have all been deployed to assist provincial crews, alongside federal teams and crews from Mexico — a scale of mutual aid that underscores just how stretched Ontario’s own resources have been.

First Nations Communities Say They Were Left Behind

The government’s cautiously optimistic framing has met sharp resistance from First Nations leaders, who held a press conference at Queen’s Park on Thursday to demand a public inquiry into the province’s wildfire response. Their core allegation is serious: that some communities were essentially left to fend for themselves during the crisis, without timely assistance from the province. Leaders said they have been unable to get meaningful answers from Premier Doug Ford, Natural Resources Minister Mike Harris, Emergency Preparedness Minister Jill Dunlop, or Indigenous Affairs Minister Greg Rickford — a list that covers the full span of ministers with direct responsibility for the emergency.

Premier Ford flatly rejected the criticism last week. When asked about the allegations, he said, “I totally disagree with that,” pointing to the province’s role in relocating roughly 2,000 people from affected First Nations communities and providing hotel accommodations, food and other support. Minister Harris acknowledged that improvements are always possible, but stopped well short of committing to a public inquiry, saying the government prefers to conduct its own internal review. “We do a very deep dive internally, and I think there’ll be lots of recommendations that will come forward,” he said, adding that the government would “see what makes sense to talk about” once those recommendations emerge — a formulation that offers communities little in the way of transparency or timeline.

When pressed directly on whether he would commit to a public inquiry, Harris deflected to the ongoing emergency. “Right now we’re very focused on direct suppression efforts and making sure that people and property are safe here in the province,” he said. He described the fire season as something “like we’ve never seen before,” and suggested the government would conduct its standard post-season review, as it does every year. That answer is unlikely to satisfy First Nations leaders who argue that an internal government review cannot credibly assess the government’s own failures — particularly when the communities most affected by those failures have Indigenous governance structures with distinct and constitutionally recognized rights that carry specific obligations for the Crown.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Greg Rickford, speaking from Kenora, offered a reminder that the situation remains unpredictable even where conditions look calm. “I’m sitting here in Kenora right now. We don’t have any smoke but by this afternoon a southeast wind could easily move into our community on a dime and put us under certain kinds of pressures,” he said. That kind of volatility — geographic, meteorological and political — defines this fire season. The fires may be calming, but the questions about how Ontario responded to its most vulnerable communities are only beginning to intensify.

Arrest at SHAPE

Belgian authorities have arrested a Canadian woman on suspicion of espionage at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium — and CBC News has identified her as Biwei Zhang, a systems engineer who previously held positions at the Canadian Space Agency, Statistics Canada, the World Trade Organization, and the European Space Agency. Zhang was arrested on Friday following a search of her home and workplace at SHAPE the previous Thursday, according to a media release from the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office. She faces charges of espionage and participation in a criminal organization, charges that Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has described as “quite serious.”

Who Is Biwei Zhang?

Zhang’s online professional profile describes her as a systems engineer with a background in economics. Belgian prosecutors had described the suspect only as a “Canadian national of Chinese origin” serving as an intern in SHAPE’s IT department — a description that CBC News matched to Zhang through open-source investigative techniques, including her LinkedIn, Facebook, and Threads profiles, her graduate thesis, and a federal court case. While Biwei Zhang appears to be her legal name, she is known professionally as Claire Zhang and uses the name Catina Zhang on Facebook. A security source cited by Reuters earlier this week had identified the suspect as Claire Z., consistent with CBC’s findings.

Zhang’s social media activity provided additional corroborating details. In July 2025, she posted in two separate Facebook groups seeking a room to rent in Mons, coinciding with the start of her SHAPE internship. A similar pattern appeared in 2023, when she sought housing in Geneva just before beginning an internship at the World Trade Organization — dates that align precisely with the work history listed on her LinkedIn profile. These breadcrumbs of ordinary life, cross-referenced with the Belgian prosecutor’s description, formed the basis of CBC’s identification.

The Significance of Intern Access

Former CSIS intelligence officer Dan Stanton offered context on why intern positions at institutions like SHAPE can be attractive to foreign intelligence services. Stanton noted that internships frequently serve as an “in-road” for intelligence gathering, because critical secrets are often obtained through casual conversations and incidental access rather than through direct theft of classified files. The nature of such access makes it difficult to detect in real time, yet the fact that Belgian counter-espionage services identified and acted on the suspected activity is, in Stanton’s view, evidence that existing counter-espionage processes are functioning as intended.

Institutional Responses

Belgian courts do not publicly identify defendants in criminal investigations until a trial begins, and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office declined to confirm Zhang’s identity to CBC News, citing its policy of never disclosing the identities of individuals suspected in ongoing investigations — an approach it characterized as grounded in the presumption of innocence, which must be guaranteed under all circumstances. Global Affairs Canada also declined to comment specifically on Zhang’s case, citing the ongoing investigation. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree, however, committed publicly to getting “to the bottom” of the arrest, signalling that the federal government is treating the matter with considerable seriousness.

The case raises broader questions about security vetting procedures for international interns at sensitive allied military installations, and about the extent to which Canadian institutions that previously employed Zhang — including the Canadian Space Agency and Statistics Canada — may be drawn into the investigation. Neither of those agencies has commented publicly on the matter.

What does the intelligence report actually say?

A classified assessment produced by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre (ITAC) in June warns that a group of Canadians currently detained overseas for alleged ISIS membership will “highly likely” pose a violent extremist threat upon returning to Canada. The report, obtained by Global News, was drafted after Iraq announced it had taken custody of an unspecified number of ISIS-affiliated individuals from Canada. Its language is direct: a potential return of these “Canadian extremist travellers” from Iraqi custody would, in the assessment’s words, “highly likely pose a violent extremist threat to Canada” — either through direct violence or by radicalizing others once back on Canadian soil.

Why is this warning surfacing now?

The report gained renewed urgency following a deadly attack at Berlin’s Pride festival on a Saturday in late June, when a 21-year-old German citizen named Abdul Ballout drove a vehicle into a crowd and attacked people with a knife, killing a Polish woman and injuring 29 others. German authorities shot and killed Ballout the following day. Prior to the attack, Ballout had travelled to Turkey and Lebanon in an attempt to join ISIS, was detained in Lebanon, and was returned to Germany in November. A German court had ordered him to attend a de-radicalization program — a measure that, in hindsight, proved insufficient. The parallel to Canada’s situation is not incidental; the ITAC report was written just a month before the Berlin attack and raises precisely the same question German authorities failed to answer correctly.

Who are the Canadians being held abroad?

The individuals in question are part of a broader wave of Canadians who left the country — from cities including Edmonton, Windsor, Montreal, and Mississauga — to join ISIS after it seized large parts of Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate. As ISIS collapsed militarily around 2018 and 2019, U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters captured a number of these individuals. Some of the Canadian women who had joined ISIS were repatriated between 2021 and 2023; the federal government brought back nine women from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, along with their children. A third of those women have since been charged with terrorism offences, while most others were placed on terrorism peace bonds — court orders restricting their movement and online access.

The men remain abroad

The Canadian government has not repatriated any of the Canadian men captured in Syria. Among the most prominent is Muhammad Ali of Mississauga, a self-admitted ISIS sniper. Others include residents of Edmonton, Windsor, and Montreal, as well as a man who obtained Canadian citizenship through his father but has never lived in Canada. A sixth Canadian, Mohammed Khalifa, was transferred to U.S. custody in 2021, flown to Washington, D.C., and subsequently sentenced to life in prison. Meanwhile, Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council stated in February 2026 that it was holding nearly 6,000 ISIS members from 61 countries — Canada among them — and planned to investigate and prosecute all of them within six months.

What threat do returning extremists actually pose?

Security analysts and former intelligence officials are consistent on this point: individuals who travelled abroad to join ISIS represent a qualitatively different kind of threat than those who were radicalized at home. Phil Gurski, a former analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), points to “the experience they have, the people they met and the anger they are returning to the country with” as factors that elevate the risk. Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, argues that even those who tried to join ISIS and failed — like Ballout — carry a lasting danger, because “their past commitment to ISIS’s cause means they carry the same latent threat: individuals who sought out the battlefield and, regardless of outcome, retain both the ideological drive and the networks to act on it later.”

The Canadians detained in Iraq went further than Ballout

Security consultant Sheryl Saperia, CEO of Pearl Strategic Counsel and a former head of an advocacy group for terrorism victims, draws a pointed distinction between the Berlin attacker and the Canadians currently in Iraqi custody. “The Canadians detained in Iraq got much further than he did,” she said. “They arrived, they lived under ISIS rule, and at least one fought for the group and publicly called for attacks here.” Saperia argues that before any repatriation occurs, Ottawa must be able to identify what admissible evidence exists to support terrorism charges in a Canadian court — and have a clear plan for cases where that evidence falls short of the legal threshold.

What is the broader threat environment in Canada?

ISIS has not disappeared. Despite being largely expelled from its Syrian territorial stronghold by 2019, the organization has persisted in what CSIS describes as an “increasingly permissive” environment. The conflict that began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel has further intensified what CSIS terms religiously motivated violent extremism. In its 2025 annual report, CSIS disclosed that it had launched seven “priority investigations involving mobilization to violence” connected to that conflict. Global News also reported that Canada disrupted four “violent extremist plots against Jewish targets” since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict — all of them linked to ISIS. The intelligence service describes ISIS as “the most significant threat to Western interests,” with an enduring goal of seizing territory to re-establish a caliphate.

What does Canada plan to do?

The ITAC report states that “Canadian authorities are actively monitoring the situation” as Iraqi courts prepare to process thousands of ISIS-affiliated detainees, including Canadians. CSIS has also warned that the evolving situation in the Middle East could “expedite timelines” associated with the return of ISIS members to Canada — meaning the question of repatriation may move from theoretical to urgent faster than expected. The intelligence service acknowledged that some returnees “would likely pose national security and public safety risks” unless Canada implements “sufficient mitigation measures,” without specifying what those measures would look like in practice. Two Canadians who had joined ISIS were convicted of terrorism offences in 2024, including the first woman successfully prosecuted after returning from Syria — but others remain in the Middle East and are actively seeking to come back, including a Montreal man imprisoned in Turkey. The legal, security, and constitutional questions surrounding repatriation remain unresolved, and the Berlin attack has made clear that the cost of getting those answers wrong can be measured in lives.