Police responded to a call for a shooting reported at 1 a.m. Saturday in the Cedar Heights Plaza parking lot on Lawrence Avenue and Markham Street in Toronto’s Scarborough area. Five men were seriously injured, although by Sunday at least three had been discharged from hospital and all are expected to fully recover. Police say the men were shot by a man driving a blue car. Toronto police officer David Hopkinson said police have not yet identified the motive for the attack and are still gathering evidence, including surveillance videos recorded by nearby stores and other agencies. “I know some people think this is a random act, but we have no evidence of that. “At the moment we are only speculating and we do not like to speculate,” he said. Interim Police Chief James Ramer announced on Twitter on Saturday that the hate crime unit was “involved”, but according to Officer Hopkinson, in cases like this the unit will not be actively involved in the investigation led by Detective Mandeep. Parmar of weapons and gangs task force. “The fact that all people have the same faith causes us some concern,” said Officer Hopkinson. The men were attacked in the middle of the holiest month of Islam, Ramadan, and this section of Lawrence Avenue has many mosques and religious centers. During Ramadan, members of the Muslim faith fast and abstain from food between dawn and dusk, and attendance increases for events such as the evening prayers, which can last until close to midnight. According to Yusuf Ingar of the Scarborough Muslim Association, some of the men had just completed their afternoon prayer at the nearby Scarborough Muslim Cultural Center, about a 20-minute walk away. “Please note that we have no reason to believe that this is a hate crime at this point. “We are working with the 43rd Division and we hope that TPS will have sufficient resources to investigate this shooting,” the union said in a statement on Sunday. Wa’il Khan, an imam in Central Mosque opposite Cedar Heights Plaza, said police had already examined the mosque’s security material since that night. “The scary part is that there are families who leave maybe half an hour earlier with children. “We had about 50 people gone,” he said. He said he believed some of the injured were regular attendees at the mosque. In the most recent report by the Toronto Police Hate Crime Unit, which covers 2020, hate crimes increased by 51 percent from 2019 to 210 reports (the decade average is about 152 per year). There were 82 reports of religiously motivated hate crimes (the largest category of crimes with 39 percent of the total), but only 5 percent of the reported victims were Muslims, while 76 percent of the reports were against those of the Jewish faith (63 percent). references). Police across Canada have come under scrutiny for their relatively low turnover of hate crimes cases, according to an analysis by The Globe and Mail. Toronto police hate crime investigations have been resolved with charges in less than 20 percent of cases. The Morning and Afternoon Newsletters are compiled by Globe editors, giving you a brief overview of the day’s most important headlines. Register today.