RAJGHAT GETS GANDHI STATUE
formers ducking for cover and fleeing the stage.
“It was the craziest stuff I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Yazzie said. “You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash, flash, flash, flash.”
Monique Dumas, of British Columbia, Canada, said she was six rows from the stage when she thought she heard a bottle breaking, then a burst of pops that sounded liked fireworks.
Las Vegas’s casinos, nightclubs and shopping outlets draw 3.5 million visitors from around the world each year and the area was packed with people when the shooting broke out shortly after 10 pm local time.
Couples held hands as they ran through the dirt lot. Faces were etched with shock and confusion, and people wept and screamed. Some were bloodied, and some were carried out by concertgoers. Dozens of ambulances took away the wounded, while some people loaded victims into their cars and drove them to hospital.
Police shut down the busy Las Vegas Boulevard and flights at Mccarran International Airport were suspended.
Hospital emergency rooms were jammed with wounded. Representative Ruben Kihuen, a Democrat whose congressional district includes a portion of Las Vegas, visited a hospital were some of the victims were taken and said: “Literally, every single bed was being used, every single hallway was being used. Every single person there was trying to save a life.”
The dead included at least three off-duty police officers who were attending the concert. Two on-duty officers were wounded, one critically.
Nearly every inch of the Las Vegas Strip is under video surveillance, much of it set up by the casinos to monitor their properties. That could yield a wealth of material for investigators as they try to piece together the attack.
Before Sunday, the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history took place in June 2016, when a gunman who professed support for the Islamic State opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people.
Sunday’s shooting came more than four months after a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK, that killed 22 people. Almost 90 people were killed by gunmen inspired by Islamic State at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal in 2015.
As with previous US mass shootings, the incident sparked anger among advocates for gun control. The second amendment of the US Constitution protects the right to bear arms, and gun rights advocates staunchly defend that provision.
“It’s time for Congress to get off its ass and do something,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where 26 young children and educators were killed in an attack on a school in 2012. played a key role in the campaign, told the Hindustan Times this was “the accumulation of all our work and the real hard work starts right now.”
Among those who were in the hall was 18-year-old Harman Kaur, a student at the University of Ottawa, who had traveled from the Canadian capital to Toronto specially for this event. “I’m so excited, I just had to be here,” she said. Another supporter Sukhminder Singh Hansra was delighted, declaring, “It is an historic day for diversity, multiculturalism and especially for the Sikh community in Canada.”
Gurmeet Kaur said the community would need to “work hard” to ensure Singh became the next prime minister of Canada, while her husband Manjeet Singh Bhinder pointed out he had been “101%” certain even before the results were declared that Singh would emerge on top.
Singh, who was born in Scarborough in Toronto, was joined on the stage by his family, including his parents Harmeet and Jagtaran Singh, sister Manjot Kaur and brother Gurratan Singh.
Singh will be in Ottawa on Monday as he meets with party MPS and the NDP leadership to chart out the course for the national campaign. He will face the challenge of making the NDP, the third party in Canadian politics, a credible choice for 2019.
But he noted his campaign had achieved this win in the few months since he announced his leadership run, and added, “Imagine what we can build together in two years.”
Among the challenges he faces is having people pronounce his name correctly, as he told one person, “Jag as in hug”.