A white 18-year-old opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in New York state, killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday in what authorities described as “racially motivated violent extremism”. Most of the victims were black.
The teenager was wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera in the attack in Buffalo. Police said he shot 11 black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch.
Later, he appeared before a judge in a paper medical gown and was arraigned on a murder charge. The suspected gunman in Saturday's attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, New York, about 320 kilometres southeast of Buffalo.
The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes.
President Joe Biden in a statement said he and the first lady were praying for the victims and their families.
“We still need to learn more about the motivation for today’s shooting as law enforcement does its work, but we don’t need anything else to state a clear moral truth: A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation,” Biden said.
“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.”
The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, security guard Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, fired multiple shots. A bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof armor but had no effect, Gramaglia said.
The gunman then killed the guard,
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