A cache of guns and explosives found in an east-end Toronto storage facility Wednesday night has been linked to a double homicide in Pickering, police say.
Durham Regional Police said Thursday they had reason to believe there could be weapons hidden in the storage locker on Progress Avenue near Kennedy Road in Agincourt and are now working on the connection between the homicides and the explosives and weapons found there.
Almost a year ago, on May 5, the bodies of Harjinder Singh Sandu and Puneet Singh Chhina were found in the trunk of a vehicle in Pickering. While two men were arrested in connection with their deaths, a Markham man on Jan. 22 and a Burnaby, B.C. man on Feb. 18, there have been no arrests linked to the explosives and weapons found in the storage unit.
Police are now looking for any information from the public that could lead them to a suspect. They would not elaborate on what kind of weapons they found or how many of them there were.
The discovery of the cache caused a number of disruptions. As a precaution, police evacuated the area and temporarily shut down the Scarborough LRT and GO Transit's Stouffville line while the explosives were removed from the building between 6:30 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Officers slowed traffic on several streets as well as the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway while the Toronto Police Service's explosives unit transported the material in a special vehicle to the Leslie Street Spit, an isolated area in the city's port lands. The explosives were detonated shortly after 11 p.m.
"There were still vehicles in the area but we had stopped them a safe distance away from the material as we moved it down the road," said Dave Selby, a spokesman for the Durham Regional Polce.