Arab Times

Death penalty sought for Texas shooting suspect

Rampage appeared to be hate crime: Abbott

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EL PASO, Texas, Aug 5, (RTRS): A single capital murder charge was filed on Sunday against the man accused of killing 20 people and wounding more than two dozen others at a Walmart store in El Paso, a mass shooting authoritie­s are viewing as a case of domestic terrorism.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Saturday’s rampage in the heavily Hispanic city appeared to be a hate crime. Police cited an anti-immigrant screed posted online shortly before the shooting, which they attributed to the suspect, Patrick Crusius, as evidence that the bloodshed was racially motivated.

It was the second of three separate public shooting sprees carried out in the United States in the span of a week, an unusually dense cluster of massacres that prompted fresh alarm in a country accustomed to reports of young men shooting down strangers.

The County of El Paso’s state court website lists a single charge of capital murder against Crusius, a 21-year-old white man from Allen, Texas.

His grandparen­ts, with whom Crusius had recently been living, said they were devastated by the attack.

“He lived with us in our house in Allen, Texas, while he attended Collin College,” the statement said, read aloud by a family friend to reporters outside the home on Sunday. “He moved out of our house six weeks ago, and has spent a few nights here while we were out of town.”

The single charge is likely a legal place holder to keep Crusius in custody until further charges can be filed against him for each of the dead and the wounded.

It was unclear if Crusius has a lawyer or when a bond hearing or other court appearance­s will occur.

A state prosecutor said prosecutor­s will seek the death penalty against Crusius if he is found guilty.

The Federal Bureau of Investigat­ion said in a statement on Sunday the attack “underscore­s the continued threat posed by domestic violent extremists and perpetrato­rs of hate crimes.”

The agency said it remains concerned that more US-based extremists could become inspired by these and previous high-profile attacks to engage in similar acts of violence.

The US attorney for the western district of Texas, John Bash, said federal authoritie­s were treating the El Paso massacre as a case of domestic terrorism.

“And we’re going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is to deliver swift and certain justice,” he told a news conference on Sunday. He said the attack appeared “to be designed to intimidate a civilian population, to say the least.”

FBI Director Christophe­r Wray told a congressio­nal panel on July 23 that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the preceding nine months and that most investigat­ions of that kind involve some form of white supremacy.

The Texas rampage was followed just 13 hours later by another mass shooting, and came a week after a man shot dead three people at a California garlic festival before he was killed by police.

In Dayton, Ohio a gunman in body armor and a mask killed nine people in less than a minute and wounded 27 others in the city’s downtown historic district before he was shot dead by police.

Democratic candidates for next year’s presidenti­al election called on Sunday for stricter gun laws and accused President Donald Trump of stoking racial tensions.

Trump has frequently derided many asylum seekers and other immigrants coming across the US southern border as liars and criminals. At a political rally he held in May, after asking the crowd what could be done about immigrants coming in illegally,

Trump smiled and joked after someone in the crowd yelled back: “Shoot them!”

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