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Canada police dig for clues after landscaper tied to deaths
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TORONTO (AP) — Vian Ewart quickly figured out why police showed up at his elegant town house with a cadaver dog to search the waist-high stone planter at his doorstep.

Ewart had for five years hired a burly landscaper named Bruce McArthur, who is suspected of being a serial killer, and police have set out on a grim search for clues that may be hidden across Canada's largest city.

Like other clients of the landscaper, Ewart finds himself struggling to comprehend how the man who tended his planters and gardens could be someone the police say violently preyed on his sexual partners and killed at least five men over the span of nearly a decade.

"I can't put the two together," the 75-year-old Ewart said Wednesday, three days after the police visited his home.

Many others in Toronto also find it hard to reconcile the accusations with their image of McArthur, a father of two adult children who occasionally worked as a Santa during the holidays at a Toronto mall.

"He looked all so normal and business-like," said Parker Liddle, who lives near a home in uptown Toronto that McArthur used as storage for his landscaping business and often saw him dropping off large planters. "To know that something as macabre as this was transpiring over the years is pretty astounding."

McArthur was arrested Jan. 18 and charged with two counts of murder in connection with the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman and Selim Esen, two men last seen in the "Gay Village" district of Toronto.

On Monday he was charged with the murders of three more men and police said they were on a wide search for other possible victims.

"This case is in its infancy. I'm not going to comment," said Edward Royle, a lawyer for McArthur, who is due back in court on Feb. 14. He has yet to enter a plea.

The lead investigator said the remains of at least three victims were buried inside two large planters and authorities were checking at least 30 other places where McArthur was known to have worked, including some of Toronto's wealthiest neighborhoods. Police said they expect to find more remains in the 12 planters they've retrieved.

Investigators also plan to also excavate part of the lawn at the home McArthur used as storage. Police have set up a tent and heaters on the property to keep the ground from freezing.

Investigators have not yet released complete details, but the 66-year-old McArthur is believed to have met his victims cruising around the city in the van he used for work and on gay dating apps for older and large men with names such as "SilverDaddies" and "Bear411."

In his SilverDaddies profile, McArthur described himself as 5 feet 10 inches tall and 221 pounds and primarily interested in younger men. "I can be a bit shy until I get to know you, but am a romantic at heart," he wrote.
On his Facebook page, he posted pictures of his cats, children and grandchildren and of himself dressed as Santa Claus.

But at least one acquaintance recalled a darker side.

Peter Sgromo, a 52-year-old part-time university teacher, said he met McArthur through an acquaintance who attended a support group for gay fathers with the landscaper. They had known each other for about 10 years when he agreed to meet McArthur at a bar in the Gay Village in April.

After some drinks, Sgromo said, McArthur led him to the back of his van, which was empty except for a single seat in the back.

The two started to have sex and at one point, Sgromo said, the burly landscaper suddenly grabbed him by the neck.  "He was seconds away from snapping it," he said. "I really thought my neck was going to be snapped the way he twisted it."

Sgromo, also 5 feet 10 inches and about 225 pounds, said he grabbed the other man's elbow and ended the encounter. He didn't report the incident to police. But after learning of McArthur's arrest he talked to an investigator.

"I never thought of Bruce as a rough sex guy. I thought of him more of a gregarious jolly guy," he said.

In 2003 McArthur was convicted for attacking a man with a metal pipe in Toronto. The sentence required that he abstain from using the drug poppers — or amyl nitrite — not be in the company of male prostitutes and stay away from a section of the downtown that included the city's Gay Village for two years.
The five homicides would make McArthur the most prolific known serial killer in Toronto.

The other three known victims are 58-year-old Majeed Kayhan, who went missing in 2012, Soroush Marmudi, 50, who went missing in 2015 and Dean Lisowick who went missing between May 2016 and July 2017. Police said Lisowick, who was in his mid-40s, was homeless, stayed in public shelters and had not been reported missing. Kinsman, 49, went missing last June and Esen, 44, was reported missing last April.

Police are looking over a number of missing person cases and trying to determine if they were victims of McArthur. They are also running down tips that have come in from around the world in what lead investigator Det. St. Hank Idsinga has called a case like Toronto has never seen before.

"We believe there are more," Idsinga said of the victims. "I have no idea how many more there are going to be."

Putin raises tension on Ukraine, suspends START nuclear pact
Putin
Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended Moscow's participation in the last remaining nuclear arms control pact with the United States, announcing the move Tuesday in a bitter speech where he made clear he would not change his strategy in the war in Ukraine.

In his long-delayed state-of-the-nation address, Putin cast his country — and Ukraine — as victims of Western double-dealing and said it was Russia, not Ukraine, fighting for its very existence.

"We aren't fighting the Ukrainian people," Putin said ahead of the war's first anniversary Friday. "The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country."

The speech reiterated a litany of grievances he has frequently offered as justification for the widely condemned military campaign while vowing no military letup in a conflict that has reawakened Cold War fears.

On top of that, Putin sharply upped the ante by declaring Moscow would suspend its participation in the New START Treaty. The pact, signed in 2010 by the U.S. and Russia, caps the number of long-range nuclear warheads the two sides can deploy and limits the use of missiles that can carry atomic weapons.

Putin also said Russia should stand ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the U.S. does so, a move that would end a global ban on such tests in place since the Cold War era.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Moscow's decision as "really unfortunate and very irresponsible."

"We'll be watching carefully to see what Russia actually does," he said while visiting Greece.

It was the second time in recent days the Ukraine war showed it could spread into perilous new terrain, after Blinken told China at the weekend that it would be a "serious problem" if Beijing provided arms and ammunition to Russia.

China and Russia have aligned their foreign policies to oppose Washington. Beijing has refused to condemn Russia's invasion or atrocities against civilians in Ukraine while strongly criticizing Western economic sanctions on Moscow. At the end of last year, Russia and China held joint naval drills in the East China Sea.

The deputy head of Ukraine's intelligence service, Vadym Skibitskyi, told The Associated Press that his agency hasn't so far seen any signs that China is providing weapons to Moscow.

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and made a dash toward Kyiv, apparently expecting to overrun the capital quickly. But stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces — supported by Western weapons — turned back Moscow's troops. While Ukraine has reclaimed many areas initially seized by Russia, the sides have become bogged down elsewhere.

The war has revived the divide between Russia and the West, reinvigorated the NATO alliance, and created the biggest threat to Putin's rule of more than two-decades. U.S. President Joe Biden, fresh off a surprise visit to Kyiv, was in Poland on Tuesday to solidify that Western unity.

While Russia's Constitution mandates that the president deliver the speech annually, Putin never gave one in 2022, as his troops rolled into Ukraine and suffered repeated setbacks. Much of it covered old ground, as Putin offered his own version of recent history, discounting Ukraine's arguments that it needed Western help to thwart a Russian military takeover.

"Western elites aren't trying to conceal their goals, to inflict a 'strategic defeat' to Russia," Putin said in the speech broadcast on all state TV channels. "They intend to transform the local conflict into a global confrontation."

He added that Russia was prepared to respond since "it will be a matter of our country's existence." He has repeatedly depicted NATO's expansion to include countries close to Russia as an existential threat to his country.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who was in Ukraine on Tuesday, said she hoped Putin had taken a different approach.

"What we heard this morning was propaganda that we already know," Meloni said in English. "He says (Russia) worked on diplomacy to avoid the conflict, but the truth is that there is somebody who is the invader and somebody who is defending itself."

Putin denied any wrongdoing in Ukraine, even after Kremlin forces struck civilian targets, including hospitals, and are widely accused of war crimes. Ukraine's military reported Tuesday that Russian forces shelled the southern cities of Kherson and Ochakiv while Putin spoke, killing six.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lamented that Russian forces were "again mercilessly killing the civilian population."

Putin began his speech with strong words for those countries that provided Kyiv with crucial military support and warned them against supplying any longer-range weapons.

"It's they who have started the war. And we are using force to end it," Putin said before an audience of lawmakers, state officials and soldiers.

Putin also accused the West of taking aim at Russian culture, religion and values because it is aware that "it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield."

Likewise, he said Western sanctions hadn't "achieved anything and will not achieve anything."

Reflecting the Kremlin's clampdown on free speech and press, it barred coverage of the address by media from "unfriendly" countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and those in the European Union, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying their journalists could watch the broadcast.

He previously told reporters that the speech's delay had to do with Putin's "work schedule," but Russian media reports linked it to the setbacks by Russian forces. The Russian president also postponed the state-of-the-nation address in 2017. Last year, the Kremlin also canceled two other big annual events — Putin's news conference and a highly scripted phone-in marathon taking questions from the public.

Analysts expected Putin's speech would be tough in the wake of Biden's visit to Kyiv on Monday, which he did not mention. In his his own speech later Tuesday, Biden is expected to highlight the commitment of the central European country and other allies to Ukraine over the past year.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Biden's address would not be "some kind of head to head" with Putin's.

"This is not a rhetorical contest with anyone else," said.