Quebec Mounties raid two rural locations in hunt for neo-Nazi terrorist group

Quebec RCMP announced Thursday they had raided two locations in rural Quebec, saying they expected to find members of a neo-Nazi group that the Canadian government has classified as a terrorist organization.

Officers conducted searches in the small towns of St-Ferdinand and Plessisville, which are close to each other, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec on the south side of the St. Lawrence River. 

"Investigation targeting individuals suspected of being associated with the terrorist group Division Atomwaffen," the police agency wrote on Twitter in the late morning.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the Atomwaffen Division is a white supremacist group based on the idea of using violence to trigger "apocalyptic collapse so a white ethnostate or whites-only utopia can be constructed in its wake."

They categorize it as "accelerationist" because it's so focused on the idea of destroying the existing social order. One of its major inspirational figures is Charles Manson.

Police said they'd taken measures to ensure the safety of the local population during the searches. 

Photos posted at the same time showed officers entering what appeared to be an apartment building, with a police dog, and at a command centre in the parking lot of a church. 

In an interview, the RCMP said the raid was part of a national security investigation that's been ongoing since 2020.

It was looking into people who may have ties to the Attomwaffen Division, but arrests weren't necessarily planned for Thursday, said an RCMP spokesperson -- the focus instead was raiding the properties.

"We're going there to collect evidence," said the spokesperson. "After that, there may be arrests."

The St. Ferdinand building that was targeted is located behind a church and was possibly used as a school at one time. The address is 547 de Vianney Route.

In Plessisville, officers targeted an apartment building at 2244 Cooperative St.

There were 60 investigators on the scene in St-Ferdinand for several hours, and they remained there early in the afternoon. In Plessisville, the raid had wrapped up by 1 p.m.

Police came equipped with an armoured vehicle as well as a dog team, and they were assisted by Quebec provincial police.

'VIOLENCE, DEPRAVITY AND DEGENERACY'

The Canadian Public Safety Department put the Atomwaffen Division on its official list of terrorist groups in 2021.

It says the group was founded in the United States in 2013 and has since expanded to other countries, including Canada. It's also known as the National Socialist Order or NSO.

The group calls for acts of violence against racial, religious, and ethnic groups as well informants, police, and bureaucrats in order to prompt the collapse of society, the department says.

The Southern Poverty Law Center said the group "is organized as a series of terror cells that work toward civilizational collapse."

"Its members, who can be fairly described as accelerationists, believe that violence, depravity and degeneracy are the only sure way to establish order in their dystopian and apocalyptic vision of the world," the organization wrote.

Quebec has long been linked to the Atomwaffen group, largely because of a prominent and prolific early figure in it who went by the name "Charles Zeiger."

He was later revealed to be Gabriel Sohier-Chaput, an IT worker in his early 30s who was living in Montreal. Sohier-Chaput went on trial in Quebec this winter for alleged hate crimes.

Sohier-Chaput's influence lives on, say those who track white supremacy groups.

"Some networks require his writings as to be read by prospective members," said Elizabeth Simons, the deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

Other than Sohier-Chaput, however, she hasn't been aware of widespread activity in Quebec by the Atomwaffen Division or its offshoots, she said.

"Apart from him, we are unaware of any Quebec membership within the Iron March Legacy network," she said.

"We know of others in other parts of Canada -- Ontario, Saskatchewan -- but this may be a person unfamiliar to us."

The reason for calling it "the Iron March Legacy network" and not the Atomwaffen Division is that over time, it has morphed into a more disparate series of groups, Simons explained. 

The group was born out of a fascist online forum called the Iron March, she said, which went offline in 2017.

Then, the Atomwaffen Division "as a formal, organized group disbanded around 2019," said Simons.

"Around 2019 they crumbled due to infighting and ideological disagreements between members."

The members, however, didn't just fade out of the movement. Some joined similar networks, while others in the core Atomwaffen membership rebranded themselves as the National Socialist Order -- another group listed as terrorists by the Canadian government.

"We generally refer to the network of groups, cells, and people as the Iron March Legacy network, because it all came out of Iron March," Simons said.

"But we do not yet know if the target(s) of the raid were part of [Atomwaffen Division], or part of NSO, or not part of any formal structure, and instead just part of the larger network."

Last month, a 19-year-old man from Windsor, Ontario, was charged with terrorism, as he allegedly filled out an online form in an effort to join the Atomwaffen Division.

The RCMP said that they didn't know if the Thursday raids were related to last month's arrest in Ontario.

-- With files from The Canadian Press and CTV's Vanessa Lee.