The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Thursday that officers had executed two search warrants in rural Quebec with alleged ties to Atomwaffen Division, a terrorist group that a watchdog official called “some of the most extreme neo-Nazis in the current landscape.” Roughly 60 officers descended upon the small towns of Saint-Ferdinand and Plessisville in what a corporal with the mounted police called a “national security operation,” though he added that no arrests were expected. The scale of the operation indicated “there’s probably a large amount of digital material to recover,” according to Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a watchdog group. Simons called Atomwaffen Division members “hyper-violent” in a recent interview with the Montreal Gazette. “They believe any chaos and violence they can commit will hasten that collapse of society,” she added. Atomwaffen Division was founded in the U.S. in 2013, where it has been linked to at least five deaths. Its ideology quickly spread north, and it was listed as a terrorist organization by the Canadian government in early 2021. Thursday’s raids bring to a crescendo an investigation that began more than two years ago, according to the CBC.
