US mourns Las Vegas massacre victims as shooter motive sought
Police seek clues; over 500 injured, some trampled in panic
LAS VEGAS: America mourned the victims of the worst gun massacre in recent US history yesterday as investigators probed the motive behind a so far apparently senseless attack on Las Vegas concertgoers. US President Donald Trump branded the attacker - who raked a crowd of thousands with gunfire from a 32ndfloor hotel room, leaving 59 dead and at least 527 injured - a “demented man”.
But beyond that diagnosis, authorities were at a loss as to why a 64-year-old gambler and retired accountant had hauled a vast arsenal of weapons to the hotel and launched his assault. Meanwhile, a grim parade of victims began to be identified in the media, each new name stirring emotions as America once again grappled with calls for reforms to its permissive firearm control laws and angst over its pervasive gun culture.
Trump, questioned by reporters as he left the White House to survey hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, was not ready to suggest answers. “What happened in Las Vegas is in many ways a miracle,” he said. “The police department has done such an incredible job, and we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.” US officials have reacted cautiously to a claim by the Islamic State jihadist group that the shooter, Stephen Craig Paddock, had carried out Sunday night’s massacre on its behalf.
Experts cautioned that the group under pressure in its Syrian and Iraqi heartlands - may be trying to rally its supporters with a false claim. In a statement, IS claimed Paddock was one of its “soldiers” but the FBI said it had found no such connection so far and the local sheriff described him as a lone “psychopath”.
LAS VEGAS: Police sought clues yesterday to explain why a retiree with a penchant for gambling but no criminal record set up a sniper’s nest in a high-rise Las Vegas hotel and poured gunfire onto a concert below, slaying dozens of people before killing himself. The Sunday night shooting spree from a 32nd-floor window of the Mandalay Bay hotel, on the Las Vegas Strip, killed at least 59 people before the gunman turned a weapon on himself. More than 500 were injured, some trampled, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
The gunman, identified as Stephen Paddock, 64, left no immediate hint of his motive for the arsenal of high-powered weaponry he amassed, including 34 guns, or the carnage he inflicted on a crowd of 22,000 attending an outdoor country music festival. Paddock was not known to have served in the military, or to have suffered from a history of mental illness or to have registered any inkling of social disaffection, political discontent or radical views on social media.
US officials also discounted a claim of responsibility by the militant Islamic State group. “We have determined to this point no connection with an international terrorist group,” Aaron Rouse, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Las Vegas, told reporters on Monday. Police said they believed Paddock acted alone but were at a loss to explain what might have precipitated it. “We have no idea what his belief system was,” Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters. “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath.”
Although police said they had no other suspects, Lombardo said investigators wanted to talk with Paddock’s girlfriend and live-in companion, Marilou Danley, who he said was traveling abroad, possibly in Tokyo. Lombardo also said detectives were “aware of other individuals” who were involved in the sale of weapons Paddock acquired. Still, the closest Paddock appeared to have ever come to a brush with the law was for a traffic infraction, authorities said.
Itinerant existence
The death toll, which officials said could rise, surpassed last year’s record massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State. Paddock, however, seemed atypical of the overtly troubled, angry young men who experts said have come to embody the profile of most mass shooters. Public records point to an itinerant existence across the US West and Southeast, including stints as an apartment manager and aerospace industry worker. But Paddock appeared to be settling in to a quiet life when he bought a home in a Nevada retirement community a few years ago, about an hour’s drive from Las Vegas and the casinos he enjoyed.
His brother, Eric, described Stephen Paddock as financially well-off and an avid enthusiast of video poker games and cruises. “We’re horrified. We’re bewildered, and our condolences go out to the victims,” Eric Paddock said in a telephone interview from Orlando, Florida. “We have no idea in the world.” Las Vegas’s casinos, nightclubs and shopping draw more than 40 million visitors from around the world each year, and the Strip was packed with visitors when the shooting started shortly after 10 pm local time on Sunday.
Bloodshed, pandemonium
The gunfire erupted during the Route 91 Harvest music festival as country music star Jason Aldean was performing. The musician ran off stage as the shooting progressed. Video of the attack showed throngs of people screaming in horror and cowering on the open ground, hemmed in by fellow concert-goers, as extended bursts of gunfire strafed the crowd from above from a distance police estimated at more than 500 yards. Those at the edges of the crowd fled as best they could, many trampled or hurt jumping over fences while the shooting went on, by some accounts, for about 10 minutes.
The bloodshed ended after police swarming the hotel closed in on the gunman, who shot and wounded a hotel security officer through the door of his two-room suite and then killed himself before police entered, authorities said. Police said 23 guns were found in Paddock’s suite, along with more than 10 suitcases. Lombardo said a search of the suspect’s car turned up a supply of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer compound that can be formed into explosives and was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal office building that killed 168 people. — Reuters
Arsenal of 34 weapons, ammo, explosives found