On his way to the Edmonton funeral of a 19-year-old member of Fort McMurray's Somali-Canadian community yesterday, Mahamad Accord says he wasn't surprised to hear the RCMP had ruled just hours earlier that Abdinasir Abdulkadir Dirie's death was a homicide.

Young men from Somali backgrounds in Northern Alberta have met their end this way a startling number of times, points out Mr. Accord, the president of the Alberta Somali Community Centre. What does surprise him, he says, is that provincial authorities seem to him to be so incurious about the pattern.

"Another Somali will die tomorrow, and it won't change a thing," Mr. Accord says.

In the past five years, scores of young Somali-Canadians have been murdered across Alberta. It's true that the latest, Mr. Dirie, was out on bail when he was found murdered in an apartment complex on April 21, charged along with four other men with dealing cocaine. Several of the murdered men have been linked to drug trafficking. But not all of them, community leaders insist.

"It's a mixed bag. Obviously, there are people who are getting mixed up in a very high-risk lifestyle. But among the deaths there are a good number of them who are innocent," says Ahmed Hussen, national president of the Ottawa-based Canadian Somali Congress. "It isn't one single narrative."

It is difficult to confirm even precisely how many men from this community have been murdered. Community leaders say in the past five years there have been 30: four in Fort McMurray; 14 in Edmonton; and a dozen scattered around the province.

RCMP, however, release no statistics on the racial patterns of provincial homicides. Newspaper reports point to at least 19 murdered Somalli-Canadians since 2005, almost all having moved from the Toronto area, as were the bulk of Alberta's roughly 12,000 citizens of Somali heritage who were attracted to the lure of so many decent-paying jobs for anyone willing to work them.

"Literally in 1998, '99, 2000 -- until about 2006, there was a huge influx of immigration from Ontario to Alberta," Mr. Hussen said. "We are talking about families of six or seven people just taking off."

Where some found virtuous opportunity, others inevitably found vice. Some young African men, including those from the Sudanese and Somali communities, took to the province's growing drug trade, says Mustafa Kamoga, a partner at Selkirk Placement, which helps find immigrant labourers for oil-patch employers in northern Alberta.

And still, there are many murdered Somali men with no apparent links to any crime -- nothing in common with one another, it seems, than being of Somali background in Alberta, and the fact that, save one, none of their killings has ever been solved.

This, Mr. Accord says, demands serious investigation. His community centre and the Canadian Somali Congress say they have been calling on the province to strike a task force to get to the bottom of it. They met last month with Alberta's Justice Minister, Alison Redford, though a ministry spokesman claims no formal request for the task force had been made. In any case, Premie, Ed Stelmach dismissed the idea last month.

"Police forces can certainly manage it," Mr. Stelmach told reporters.

Next month, Mr. Accord says he will hold a community meeting with federal MPs and municipal officials from Calgary and Edmonton to try his luck with other levels of government.

He worries that the fact that a number of the murdered men have had run-ins with the law has people, and politicians, looking the other way.

"It's sad that what kind of society we live in that we only blame the victims," he said. "It's missing the point. Police have no answer for this issue so what they're doing is looking for excuses to deflect the criticism. That's the issue. If I'm killed, and someone looks at my history and says, 'wow, he's known to police,' so that's it? He deserved to die?"

That these crimes have mounted for years, with no sign of progress from authorities in understanding or addressing it, has undermined the faith of many in Alberta's Somali community in the willingness of authorities to protect them, Mr. Accord believes. He's reminded, he says, of a Somali parable about a village plagued by a coyote ravaging its livestock. When the villagers uproot their families and travel many miles to resettle and escape, they find the coyote there waiting for them -- and complaining about the long walk.

"Right now, people are saying they escaped coyotes eating their kids in Mogadishu, and now they find them waiting for them in Alberta."