18-yr-old kills 10 in US hate crime
BUFFALO: A heavily armed 18-year-old white man shot 10 people dead on Saturday at an American grocery store in New York’s Buffalo in a “racially motivated” attack that he livestreamed on camera, authorities said.
The gunman, who was wearing body armour and a helmet, was arrested after the massacre, Buffalo Police Commiscalled sioner Joseph Gramaglia said.
Gramaglia put the toll at 10 dead and three wounded. Eleven of the victims were African Americans. The gunman shot four people in the parking lot of the supermarket, three of them fatally, then went inside and continued firing, he said.
US President Joe Biden expressed condolences to the families of those killed and
for “every effort to end domestic terrorism”. In a White House statement, Biden said: “We grieve for the families of ten people whose lives were senselessly taken...Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America”.
BUFFALO, NEW YORK: Federal agents interviewed the parents of the teenager accused of shooting and killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket and served multiple search warrants, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Federal authorities were still working to confirm the authenticity of a 180-page manifesto that was posted online, which detailed the plot and identified Payton Gendron by name as the gunman, the official said. Authorities say the Saturday afternoon shooting was motivated by racial hatred.
Payton Gendron’s parents were cooperating with investigators, the official said.
A preliminary investigation found Gendron had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories and extensively researched the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, the official said.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Gendron had travelled about 320km from his Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and that particular grocery store, but investigators believe Gendron had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the Tops Friendly Market and had been searching for communities with a high number of African-American residents, the official said.
The market is located in a predominantly Black neighbourhood.
In a Sunday interview with ABC, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said that Gendron had been in town “at least the day before”.