The US police consider Saturday’s fatal mass shooting a so-called “hate crime”, or a crime with a racial motive. That says the police commander of the city of Buffalo, where the shooting incident took place. The suspect is therefore being prosecuted on suspicion of committing a hate crime.
An eighteen-year-old white man shot and killed ten people in the city. Another three people were injured. Eleven of the thirteen victims were black Americans.
The gunman is charged with a racially motivated hate crime. The FBI says it is investigating the shooting as a case of “racially violent extremism”.
According to the police commander, the suspect is in the cell under stricter supervision: the man may want to take his own life. He also held a gun to his own neck during his arrests, but officers persuaded him to surrender.
The suspect entered a supermarket around 2:30 p.m. local time on Saturday and immediately started shooting around him. Many black Americans live in the neighborhood of the supermarket. The suspect would have come from outside Buffalo himself and would have livestreamed his act on the social medium Twitch. “He drove for hours to commit this crime against the people of Buffalo,” Mayor Byron Brown said.
The suspect would also have put a manifesto of more than a hundred pages online, in which he describes himself as an eighteen-year-old who is convinced of the superiority of white people.
The White House announced on Sunday that US President Joe Biden will travel to Buffalo on Tuesday with his wife Jill. He will have a meeting with the families of the victims. In an earlier statement, Biden condemned the shooting. “Any act of domestic terrorism, including one committed in the name of an abhorrent white nationalist ideology, contradicts everything we stand for in America. Hate must not have a safe haven. We must do everything in our power to end hate-fuelled domestic terrorism.”