YouTube attacker was a vegan activist
Police still investigating motive behind shooting that wounded three
The woman identified by police as the attacker who wounded three people at YouTube’s headquarters in California was a vegan blogger who accused the video- sharing service of discriminating against her, according to her online profile.
Police said 39- year- old Nasim Najafi Aghdam from San Diego was behind Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube’s offices in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, where the company owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google employs nearly 2,000 people.
A man was in critical condition and two women were seriously wounded in the attack, which ended when Aghdam shot and killed herself.
Californian media reported that Aghdam’s family had warned the authorities that she may target YouTube before the shooting. Her father Esmail Aghdam told The Mercury News that he had told police that she might be going to YouTube’s headquarters because she “hated” the company.
Police said they were still investigating possible motives but Aghdam’s online activities show that she believed YouTube was deliberately obstructing her videos from being viewed. “YouTube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views,” she wrote on YouTube according to a screenshot of her account.
Writing in Persian on her Instagram account, Aghdam said she was born in Iranian city of Urmiah. “I think I am doing a great job,” she wrote. “But I live on a planet that is full of injustice and diseases.”
Her family in Southern California recently reported her missing because she had not been answering her phone for two days, police said. Early Tuesday, police found her sleeping in her car and called her family to say everything was under control, hours before she walked onto the company grounds with a gun and opened fire.