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Canadians stunned by attack on Mounties

TORONTO - A bagpiper played Amazing Grace and flags flew at half-staff Friday as Canadians grappled with the deadliest attack on police officers in 120 years, after four Mounties were slain during a raid on a marijuana farm in a rural western hamlet.

"Canadians are shocked by this brutality and join me in condemning the violent acts that brought about these deaths," Prime Minister Paul Martin said.

The four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers had been investigating reports of stolen property and marijuana on a farm in Mayerthorpe, a small hamlet of some 1,300 people in western Alberta province.

Police identified the four Mounties as Peter Christopher Schiemann, Anthony Fitzgerald Orion Gordon, Lionide Nicholas Johnston and Brock Warren Myrol.

A spokesman, Cpl. Wayne Oakes, said the Mounties and the suspected gunman were found in a Quonset hut on the farm Thursday. The suspect reportedly killed himself. He was identified by police as 46-year-old James Roszko. Authorities said he had a long criminal record, including the use of illegal firearms and sexual assault.

Myrol, 29, had been on the job for two weeks.

"He loved the RCMP and all it stood for," his family said. "Our country is hurting. We have lost four dedicated citizens who were willing to do something about it."

Canada is grappling with an increase in organized crime behind the multibillion-dollar marijuana industry. The drugs move across the border inside semitrailer trucks, stashed in drums of frozen raspberries, tucked in shipments of crushed glass, wood chips and sawdust, or hollowed-out logs.

Kayakers paddle it south from British Columbia across the bays of America's northwest corner and couriers carry up to 100 pounds in makeshift backpacks, hiking eight hours over the mountainous terrain that forms part of the western border between the United States and Canada. Small planes drop it in hockey bags equipped with avalanche beacons to alert traffickers that the drugs have landed.

The contraband is called BC bud, a potent form of marijuana named for the province where it is grown and which has become the center of what law enforcement officials say is an increasingly violent $7-billion cultivation and smuggling industry.

This drug trafficking, with northwestern Washington state and Seattle a key transit point, comes as an enormous challenge to U.S. law enforcement agents stationed along the often-invisible border. They already are dealing with the threat of terrorism, the flow of immigrants and new human smuggling operations, being run by some of the same Canada-based criminal organizations moving the marijuana south and cash, cocaine and guns north, U.S. and Canadian law enforcement officials say.

Now law enforcement officials here fear the violence will migrate south. Leigh H. Winchell, special agent in charge for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, likened currently low-crime Seattle to "Miami before the drug wars," because of an impending threat of drug-related violence.

Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

[Last modified March 5, 2005, 00:42:15]