A Canadian man was “hunting for Muslims to kill” when he slammed his pickup truck into a family out on an evening stroll, the prosecution said in closing arguments Tuesday.

Nathaniel Veltman, now 22, is on trial for wiping out three generations of the Afzaal family in June 2021 in London, Ontario.

He pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder, which prosecutors say were premeditated, as well as one count of attempted murder.

The case marks the first time a Canadian jury has been asked to consider a terrorism motive related to white supremacy.

While acknowledging Veltman’s responsibility for the killings, the defense said he should be convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter.

Prosecutor Fraser Ball told the jury they have “everything you could possibly need to convict in this case,” including the defendant’s confession to police.

He said Veltman had penned a “terrorist manifesto,” found on his computer, in which he espoused white nationalism and described his hate for Muslims.

The accused “dressed like a soldier” wearing body armor and a helmet, and “pumped himself up” before the attack. “He was hunting for Muslims to kill,” Fraser said.

‘Pedal to the metal’

When Veltman passed the Afzaal family on a London street, the Crown attorney said, he turned his pick-up truck around and accelerated “pedal to the metal,” jumping the curb as he drove into them.

Bodies flew into the air.

Salman Afzaal, 46, his wife Madiha Salman, 44, their 15-year-old daughter Yumnah and her grandmother Talat Afzaal, 74, were killed. A nine-year-old boy orphaned in the ramming suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries.

Veltman was arrested in a nearby parking lot and told police he wanted to “send a strong message” against Muslim immigration.

Ball said that message was “brutal and terrifying: Leave this country or you and your loved ones could be next.”

Defense lawyer Christopher Hicks argued that Veltman suffered from mental disorders and childhood traumas that led to “depression and anxiety.”

He also consumed three grams of hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms prior to the attack that, according to Hicks, left him feeling detached or disconnected from reality “as if in a dream or surreal state, a state of extreme confusion wherein his brain was in turmoil.”

“He is responsible for the deaths of these people,” Hicks concluded, but added that Veltman did not have the necessary “mental acuity for planning and deliberation” for murder or terrorism.

Veltman faces up to life in prison if convicted of first-degree murder. Manslaughter carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison.

This was the deadliest anti-Muslim attack in Canada since a shooting at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017 that left six dead. The perpetrator of that shooting was not charged with terrorism.

McDonald’s boss in Britain said Tuesday the US fast-food giant faces “one to two” sexual harassment allegations from workers every week, as he vowed to tackle the issue recently exposed by the BBC.

Alistair Macrow, chief executive of McDonald’s UK and Ireland, told a watchdog parliamentary committee that the chain’s management also receives around five reports a week of bullying.

He said that his employees’ accounts of alleged harassment and racism were “truly horrific and hard to listen to”.

It follows the BBC reporting in July numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, racism and bullying by staff at McDonald’s outlets in Britain.

The company says it has dismissed 18 employees and taken 75 disciplina measures, after examining 157 reported cases, since the scandal emerged.

Some 249 cases remain to be investigated, it has said.

Law firm Leigh Day recently launched group legal action against McDonald’s after the BBC aired the accusations, which included employees’ claims they were “groped and harassed almost routinely”.

McDonald’s UK opened a specialist unit to investigate the allegations, which stemmed from the accounts of around 100 staff, according to the British broadcaster.

Appearing before lawmakers in parliament, Macrow reiterated that he was “absolutely determined to root out any of these behaviours”.

He pledged to identify individuals who are responsible for them and “make sure they are eradicated from our business”.

But earlier in the hearing, union leaders claimed that, contrary to those assertions, the situation had not improved within McDonald’s since it launched its internal probes.

The unions also claim that the firm has a history of using out-of-court settlements in response to such allegations, including non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union alleged four years ago that more than 1,000 female employees of the fast-food giant were victims of sexual harassment and abuse.

This year’s BBC investigation revealed that many female employees under the age of 18 reported being sexually or emotionally harassed.

One ex-employee, Shelby, who was only 16 when she started working at McDonald’s, told the broadcaster that she was constantly touched in an inappropriate and unwanted ways by older male employees in the kitchen.

The fast-food chain has 177,000 employees in the UK, many of whom are young workers, including teenagers.

A fresh landslide hampered efforts to rescue 40 labourers trapped in an under-construction tunnel in Uttarakhand for over 70 hours. Rescue officials had spent hours preparing a platform for the auger drilling machine to insert steel pipes through the rubble, but a landslide on Tuesday night forced them to dismantle the machine and start work on the platform again.

The drilling machine would have helped create a passage for the labourers to come out of the tunnel which collapsed on Sunday morning. Officials said around 21 metres of slab blocking the tunnel has been removed and a 19 metres passage is yet to be cleared.

Uttarkashi District Magistrate Abhishek Ruhela had earlier told reporters that the trapped labourers could be evacuated today.

“If everything goes as planned, the trapped labourers will be evacuated by Wednesday,” he said after visiting the accident site on Tuesday evening.

But the latest visuals showed rescue teams dismantling the drilling machine and the platform that had been created.

In an update, the state disaster response force said that work is on to set up a new drilling machine.

Videos from the spot showed huge piles of concrete blocking the tunnel, twisted metal bars from its broken roof buried in rubble creating more obstacles for rescue workers – who are mostly migrants from Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Odisha, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh.

The plan is to push through both 800- and 900-millimetre diameter sections of mild steel pipes — one after the other — into the rubble using drilling equipment and create an escape passage for the workers who, officials said earlier, are safe and being provided with oxygen, water, food packets and medicines through tubes.

There are eight 900-millimetre diameter pipes with a length of six metres each and five pipes of 800-millimetre diameter of the same length, the State Emergency Operation Centre said.

A part of the tunnel being built between Silkyara and Dandalgaon on the Brahmakhal-Yamunotri National Highway caved in on Sunday following a landslide. The trapped workers have a buffer of around 400 metres to walk and breathe, officials said.

The rescue teams have also successfully established communication with the workers with Walkie-Talkies. Initial contact was made via a note on a scrap of paper, but later rescuers managed to connect using radio handsets.