Toronto rapper Top 5 stabbed following Drake concert in U.K.
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Toronto Star
23-07-2025
- Toronto Star
Marching backward? Why a recent event in Toronto leads in the wrong direction
Toronto has many nicknames, some more well known than others. There's Toronto the Good, reflecting Toronto's long history of temperance and intrusive moral policing. There's Hogtown, evoking visions of vast abattoirs along the lower Don River and the Eastern Lakeshore. There's T-Dot, The 6ix, The Big Smoke and The Queen City. Also, and much, much more puzzling for today's average Torontonian, there's The Belfast of Canada. This nickname comes from Toronto's long association — as noted in the Star this month — with the Grand Orange Lodge, more commonly known as the Orange Order. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, it's a fraternal organization for Protestant men of British origin. The Orange Order has existed in Canada since its earliest days as a British colony and by 1920, at its peak, counted about 100,000 members in 2,000 lodges nationwide. This is even more impressive considering the Canadian population was around 8.5 million at the time, and that Order membership was limited to Protestant men, largely of British descent.
CTV News
17-07-2025
- CTV News
Cellphones smuggled, then flushed: how rapper Top5 evaded Ontario's prison guards to shoot a music video
Toronto rapper Top5 is seen in a jail cell at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in a new music video released on June 23, 2023. (Instagram/Top5) Ontario prison guards were furiously trying to seize the cellphone camera that Toronto rapper Top5 was using to record a music video in his cell, new documents obtained by CTV News Toronto reveal. They stopped one phone from coming in that was smuggled in a visitor's bra, and wondered if their own laptop cameras had somehow been repurposed as pictures of Top5, whose real name is Hassan Ali, kept surfacing online, an investigative report says. In November 2022, guards strip-searched Ali but didn't find anything, as the rapper, who was awaiting a murder trial, taunted them that they were 'too late,' the document says. 'The inmate reportedly said the search was a week late, as he recorded himself eating cheeseburgers after receiving them from overnight correctional staff,' the report says. 'The inmate further stated that a music video would be posted via social media the following week and alleged that he utilized an iPhone 12 cellular device to capture the content before flushing it down the toilet.' The video was posted not the following week, but about seven months later in June of 2023. It showed Ali clearly behind prison walls at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton, Ont., rapping the song '21 Questions' while wearing orange jail-issue clothing. Unauthorized photography is not permitted behind bars, and at the time, Ontario's solicitor general, Michael Kerzner, vowed a full investigation. After he beat the murder charge, Ali said in interviews that he had paid a prison guard $10,000 to bring in the phone. But the investigation report, which was obtained via a freedom of information request and is heavily redacted, is silent on who that guard could have been and whether anyone was caught or punished for allowing the phone into Ali's hands. top5 The video Top5 filmed in his jail cell was posted about seven months later in June of 2023. (CTV News Toronto) Kerzner, reached Wednesday at an unrelated news conference, couldn't say either way whether anyone had been disciplined, and defended the guards, saying most do their jobs. '99.9 per cent of everyone that keeps Ontario safe does just that. I don't direct the ministry. This is an operational issue, but again, we will hold everyone to account,' he said. Ali was cleared of murder charges in September 2024, after he was accused of being involved in the shooting of 20-year-old Hashim Omar Hashi, who police said was an innocent victim gunned down at his parking garage. Ali spent time in California on the run, claiming his innocence over his social media account before he was arrested and returned the Canada. In January 2025, Ali was arrested again, this time for charges including unauthorized possession of a firearm. Hassan Ali, Top5 Hassan Ali, also known as rapper 'Top5,' speaks to reporters outside a Toronto court after being set free on Sept. 23, 2024. (CP24) On Monday night, he was stabbed hours after attending a concert by fellow Canadian rapper Drake in the United Kingdom, police there said. Fellow rapper DJ Akademiks posted on his Instagram page that he had spoken with Ali, and he was injured but would recover. 'He has a big laceration,' he said. 'It was kind of deep. He lost a lot of blood. He went through surgery. He's going to have a full recovery, that's a fact.' Thousands of cellphones are smuggled into Canadian prisons every year, a recent W5 investigation found. In the federal system, there were more than 2,700 seizures of cellphones or items related to cellphones in 2023-24, a 25 per cent climb from the previous year. In Quebec, almost 2,000 cellphones were seized in 2023-2024, a number that has almost doubled since 2021-22.
Toronto Star
15-07-2025
- Toronto Star
Toronto rapper Top 5 stabbed following Drake concert in U.K.
Hassan Ali, also known as Toronto rapper Top 5, was stabbed in the leg by a mob that surrounded his vehicle in London, U.K., hours after he attended a concert by fellow Torontonian Drake, police have confirmed. Spotify
