A heavily armed 18-year-old white man shot and killed 10 people yesterday at a store in Buffalo, New York state, in a suspected “racially motivated” attack described as “domestic terrorism” by President Joe Biden.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia reported at a news conference “ten people dead” and three others wounded. Eleven of the victims were African American.
“We are investigating this incident as a hate crime and a case of racially motivated extremist violence,” Stephen Belongia, a special agent with the FBI office in Buffalo, on the edge of Lake Erie, on the Canadian border, told reporters.
We are investigating this incident as a hate crime and a case of racially motivated extremist violence.
The attacker, arrested immediately at the scene on charges of “premeditated death”, was wearing a helmet equipped with a camera to broadcast his crime live on the internet, a bulletproof vest and military-type attire, according to local judicial authorities. and police.
President Joe Biden denounced the attack as “domestic terrorism” and thanked the police and emergency services for their reaction. “Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant ideology of white nationalism, is antithetical to everything we stand for in the United States,” he said in a statement.
The attacker first shot four people in the supermarket parking lot, three of whom died, and then entered the store and continued shooting, the sheriff of this city in western New York said. The victims included a retired police officer working as an armed security guard who “confronted the suspect,” but the suspect resisted, protected by his bulletproof vest, and shot him dead, Gramaglia said.
‘Pure evil’
As soon as the police arrived at the scene, the shooter turned his weapon on himself, at neck level before turning himself in to the authorities, according to Commissioner Gramaglia. It was an act of “pure evil,” said John Garcia, sheriff of Erie County, where Buffalo is located.
It was an act of “pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said.
“It’s a racist and hate crime,” he added. US media indicated that the authorities are investigating a manifesto “of a racist nature” spread over the internet in which the suspect explained his plans and his motivations.
The newspaper New York TimesCiting this manifesto, he assures that the suspect had been “inspired” by acts of white supremacism such as the murder of 51 Muslims in mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch in 2019.
According to the local newspaper The Buffalo Newsthe semi-automatic weapon used in the shooting was inscribed with a racial epithet and the number 14, symbolic of supremacism.
District Attorney John Flynn told a news conference that the attacker used “an assault weapon,” but did not say what type. His office said overnight that the suspect, identified as Payton Gendron, was being held without bail and charged with first-degree murder, exposing him to life in prison without parole.
Previously asked by the press if the attacker could face the death penalty at the federal level, the attorney for the Western District of New York, Trini Ross, replied: “All options are on the table.”
‘Day of great sorrow’
The author of the shooting, who was carrying a camera, began to spread the crime through the Twitch platform, which declared itself “devastated” and promised “zero tolerance against all forms of violence.”
“We have investigated and confirmed that less than two minutes after the violence began, we removed the transmitted images,” a spokesman for the service told AFP. streaming.
“We are taking all appropriate measures, including monitoring any account that retransmits this content,” he added. Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, which sits along the Canadian border, said the attacker “traveled hours from outside this community to commit this crime.” “This is a day of great sorrow for our community,” Brown said.
The attacker traveled hours from outside this community to perpetrate this crime. It is a day of great sorrow for our community.
This shooting adds to other recent racially motivated shootings in the United States. In 2019, a white gunman traveled several hours across Texas and killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, where a large part of the population is Hispanic.
Four years earlier in Charleston, South Carolina, a white man opened fire in an African-American church, killing nine people. In both cases, the shooters posted hateful manifestos before committing the shootings.
Last month, a “sniper-type” opened fire in an affluent Washington neighborhood, wounding four people and then killing himself.
Despite recurring deadly shootings and wave of gun violence across the country, multiple initiatives to reform gun laws have failed in the US Congress, leaving states and city halls to enact their own restrictions.
NEW YORK (AFP)
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