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The attacks targeted “the capital of prostitution and obscenity, the lead carrier of the cross in Europe — Paris,” the statements said, adding France was singled out because of its role in the international coalition fighting ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

The identically-worded statements offered no new information about the attacks other than what had already been reported but the familiar accent of the narrator of the English version caught the attention of some Canadians.

The Canadian-sounding inflection in his voice was first noticed by Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam of the Dalhousie University Resilience Research Centre, who is studying Canadian foreign fighters, including those in ISIL.

While Canada’s threat level remains unchanged, we are being extra vigilant in Canada as we continue to monitor the situation in Paris very closely

Ray Boisvert, a security consultant and former counter-terrorism chief at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said he had played the recording to a linguist who was convinced the reader “absolutely” sounded Canadian.

Recording terrorist propaganda using the voice of someone who “sounds like the guy next door” was meant “to be more chilling” and attract recruits, he said. Even the jihadist chant in the background of the audio was in English.

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Previous ISIL videos have featured Canadians John Maguire, André Poulin and Farah Mohamed Shirdon — presumably in an attempt to spread the extremists’ message more effectively to English-speaking audiences. But in this case, the narrator was not identified.

The FBI issued a seeking information alert in October 2014 over an English-speaking man with a similar-sounding voice who narrated an ISIL video called Flames of War. The video showed him forcing prisoners to dig their own graves and then executing them.