Temple shooter is linked to racist group

FBI’S Milwaukee office ‘looking at ties to white supremacist groups’

Police on Monday probed the white power ties of the former US soldier who gunned down six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, while the close-knit Indian-American community mourned its dead.

Wade Michael Page, 40, burst into the temple with a 9mm handgun and several magazines of ammunition — all of which had been purchased legally — and opened fire on worshippers attending a Sunday service, authorities said.

Special Agent Teresa Carlson, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Milwaukee office, said the suspect — killed at the scene during a shootout with police — is now the subject of a “domestic terrorism” investigation.

“We are looking at ties to white supremacist groups,” she told reporters. “No law enforcement agency had any reason to believe he was plotting anything,” she said. But the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights group, branded Page a “frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band,” and the SITE Intelligence Group said he was an active skinhead.

Page was a member of the Hammerskins Nation, a group that describes itself on its website as a “leaderless group of men and women who have adopted the White Power Skinhead Lifestyle,” SITE said in a report.“He was identified as a mentor for aspiring skinheads,” SITE said. He maintained user accounts on “some of the most prominent white supremacist forums.”

He issued messages “urging active resistance ‘regardless of the outcome,’” and in posts “urged members of the forum not to leave the US upon the implementation of policies and social developments that they opposed.”

The Southern Poverty Law Centre said the ex-soldier had tried to purchase goods from the National Alliance, a major US hate group, in 2000, and had more recently been the leader of the hardcore punk band “End Apathy. ” Photographs of the band on its Myspace webpage (myspace.com/endapathyband) showed Page with a shaved head and Gothic tattoos all over his body. Band members were shown performing in front of extremist flags, including one bearing the swastika emblem of the Nazi Party. US President Barack Obama said “soul searching” was needed on how to reduce violence in America after the killings, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he was “deeply shocked and saddened.”