Article content

On Tuesday morning, Abdulahi Hasan Sharif made his first appearance in an Edmonton court for an alleged weekend rampage that’s being treated as an act of terrorism.

Sharif is accused of ramming a police officer with a car, stabbing the officer multiple times, and then trying to run down pedestrians in a U-Haul van, hitting four people. Miraculously, nobody was killed.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or What legal options authorities had to prevent the Edmonton attack Back to video

Photo by Police photo

Though Sharif does not currently face formal terrorism charges, he is facing five counts of attempted murder and and other charges related to dangerous driving and possessing a weapon. But police found an ISIL flag in his vehicle and had been tipped off in 2015 that Sharif was “espousing extremist ideologies.”

Questions remain about why Sharif was allegedly able to attempt this attack if police had already been warned about him. The RCMP, which is running the current investigation, is providing very few details, but here are a few of the outstanding issues.