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One man single-handily ground to a halt the most complex forms of sex reassignment surgery in Canada with an arson attempt Monday night that’s being investigated as a possible hate crime.

He burst through the side door and bolted up a flight of stairs, alarming the staff member who’d thought he was a colleague locked out near the garbage bins. He made his way down the hospital-like halls and deep into a pristine surgical unit with an “incendiary device” in his hands.

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He took off as alarms sounded and water started falling from sprinklers overhead, squelching the flames before firefighters arrived.

Montreal police are now investigating it as arson. They have not identified a motive and don’t want to speculate, nor are they releasing many details about the suspect or what he used to start the fire, but it is being treated as a possible hate crime.

What makes the attack so stunning isn’t just the near miss — no one was hurt despite the plethora of flammable, even explosive materials in the medical setting — but the fact it has shuttered, even temporarily, the only place in Canada offering the most complex forms of sex reassignment surgery.