A shooter, reportedly yelling “all Jews must die’’, has opened fire during a baby naming ceremony at a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 people and wounding six others including four police officers who dashed to the scene.
Police said a suspect was in custody after the attack at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighbourhood. The suspect, identified as Robert Bowers, aged in his 40s, was not known to law enforcement authorities before the shooting. MSNBC said he was armed with an AR-15 rifle and two handguns.
City officials said the shooting was being investigated as a federal hate crime with Scott Brady, the US attorney for Pennsylvania’s Western District, saying the gunman’s actions “represent the worst of humanity”.
It comes amid a rash of high-profile attacks in an increasingly divided country, including the series of pipe bombs mailed over the past week to prominent Democrats and former officials.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the airport in Indianapolis that there were “a lot of people killed” and “a lot of people very badly wounded” and that the shooting “looks definitely like it’s an anti-Semitic crime’’.
A social media profile of Robert Bowers was removed shortly after the gunman was captured in a firefight with police. Before it vanished, however, it gave a horrific glimpse of a man steeped in anti-semitism and white supremacism who poured out his hatred in a vast stream of vitriol. A message posted hours before the attack stated: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
Bowers, believed to be 46, was described as an active poster on Gab, an alternative version of Twitter that is popular with white supremacists, white nationalists, members of alt-right groups and others who have been kicked off mainstream social media sites. Gab said after the shooting that it had backed up all Bowers’s data before closing his account and informing the FBI.
Read the article in The Australian (AP).