Greyhound yanks ads praising peaceful bus travel after attack
OTTAWA (AFP) — North American bus company Greyhound Lines said Thursday it had pulled billboard advertisements lauding bus travel as serene and carefree after a passenger was beheaded last week on its route in Western Canada during a gruesome attack.
The cross-Canada advertising campaign touted: "There's a reason you've never heard of 'bus rage.'"
"I had confirmation this morning that all of the advertisements have been removed," the bus company's spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh told AFP.
"We'd asked last week for them to be immediately pulled, realizing that the ads were no longer appropriate and could be offensive," she said.
Last week, a passenger ran amok on a Greyhound bus, stabbing, gutting and beheading his seat mate, who was on his way home to Winnipeg from a job as a carnival worker in Edmonton.
Prosecutors said police observed the accused eating pieces of his victim when they surrounded the bus on a desolate highway about 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Winnipeg immediately following the July 30 attack.
The assailant had also pocketed the victim's nose, lips and ear, and was taunting police and bystanders with the head, investigators said.
Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton, faces a second-degree murder charge in the grisly case.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), meanwhile, was slammed Thursday for its latest ad campaign that compared the killing of passenger Tim McLean to the slaughter of animals.
Three newspapers approached by PETA refused to run it, and hundreds of Canadians have called in their support to publishers for turning away PETA's business in this instance.
"We just thought that it was very disrespectful to the victim's family and also we just thought it was inappropriate to compare a human life to an animal," said Portage Daily Graphic publisher Barry Clayton.
The PETA ad draws comparisons between cold-blooded homicide and the torture of animals in slaughterhouses, making the point that slaughter should always be shocking.
"An innocent young victim's throat is cut, his struggles and cries are ignored, the man with the knife shows no emotion, the victim is slaughtered and his head cut off, his flesh is eaten," said the PETA ad.
"We're hoping that this ad makes those who were rightly shocked by the horror of (Li's) alleged crimes consider that the same violence inflicted on Tim McLean before his flesh was eaten is inflicted every day on millions of chickens, pigs, fish and cows before their flesh is eaten," PETA spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt said in an interview with AFP.
"If this ad leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, we just hope that they will give a thought to what sensitive animals think and feel when they come to the end of their frightening journey."
According to reports, McLean had been asleep, his cheek pressed against the window of the bus when his assailant struck suddenly near dusk, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest with a "big Rambo knife."
The other 34 passengers and the driver were jolted by "blood-curdling screams" and fled, bracing the door on their way out to trap the assailant inside the bus, witnesses said.
After a three-hour standoff, Li jumped out of a broken window on the bus and was subdued by police.
On Tuesday, a judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation of the accused before his next scheduled court appearance on September 8.
