A 25-year-old man has shaken a nation to its foundations. An extreme form of mental aberration, driven by calculated malevolence, alone explains what the authorities in Canada have described as the deadliest incident of violence in the country’s history.

There may be nothing particularly novel in the method that was adopted in Toronto on Monday ~ driving a vehicle into a busy sidewalk to kill and kill with abandon. Over the past few years, such bonfires of sanity have been reported from Barcelona to California.

If the latest tragedy has been a front-page splash in large parts of the world, it is primarily because Alek Minassian has been charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder. Toronto is traumatised.

It would be idle to speculate at this juncture whether the assassin had a terrorist connection; any conclusion must await the investigation ~ a process that is bound to be lengthy. For now, the authorities are shaking their heads in disbelief, desperately attempting to make sense of what has happened.

Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau has described it as a “senseless attack and a horrific tragedy”. In the absence of substantive evidence, he has downplayed any possible link to terrorism, saying that at the moment there was no evidence to suggest there is a “national security element” to the outrage.

“We cannot as Canadians choose to live in fear every single day as we go about our daily business.” And yet Government officials have not ruled out an act of terrorism. While it might be premature quite yet to condemn the van rampage as an instance of militant activity, it has raised fears about Toronto’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack.

The scene evoked memories of deadly vehicle rampages carried out by extremists in a number of major Western cities in recent years, including New York, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Barcelona and Nice.

It is now fairly confirmed that the assassin is a socially troubled computer studies graduate who posted a hostile message towards women on Facebook moments before his deadly rampage, one that has left Toronto and the rest of the country baffled.

Thus far, the investigation has been riveted to the temperament of the assassin ~ that he had been a hitherto harmless loner who harboured an aversion towards women.

Yet none of these traits of personality, however awkward, can explain the cold-blooded killing of ten people and the injuries suffered by many more.

The mayhem has destroyed the intrinsic character of Toronto, generally regarded as a multicultural, humanistic city. The city has lost its innocence, and Canada is in mourning. Toronto has been traumatised by an individual.