What happened in the Buffalo supermarket shooting on Saturday?

Authorities suspect another racist killing of a white supremacist. An 18-year-old white man opened fire in a supermarket in New York State on Saturday, killing at least ten people, most of them African-Americans.

“We are investigating this incident as both a hate crime and a case of racially motivated violent extremism,” Buffalo FBI police officer Stephen Belongia said at a news conference in that city. North American, on the shores of Lake Erie, on the border with Canada.

The killer has been arrested

The killer, who was heavily armed, was immediately arrested on the spot, initially prosecuted for “premeditated murder” and imprisoned. It is about a young white man who was equipped with an “assault weapon”, a bulletproof vest, military-style clothing, a helmet and a camera to broadcast his crime live on the internet, announced the local police and judicial authorities.

Buffalo Police Chief Joseph Gramaglia reported “ten people killed” and three others injured. Eleven were black people and two were white, in this predominantly African-American neighborhood of Buffalo.

According to Commissioner Gramaglia, the killer first shot four people in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket, killing three of them, before entering the business and committing carnage there. There, a security guard, a retired policeman, shot the assailant but the latter, protected by his bulletproof vest, was not injured and shot the guard.

“A Hate and Racist Motivated Crime”

When the police arrived very quickly on the scene, the young man turned his weapon against him, at the level of his neck, before surrendering to the police, according to Commissioner Gramaglia. The attack is “a hate crime and racially motivated” perpetrated by “evil incarnate,” blasted Erie County Sheriff John Garcia.

“Hate crime” in the United States refers to an act directed against a targeted person because of elements of their identity such as race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or disability. Considered an aggravated federal offence, it carries harsher sentences.

Asked if the shooter faced the death penalty at the federal level, the local representative of the prosecution of the United States Department of Justice replied that “all options were on the table”.

Crime streamed live on Twitch

The assailant, who was carrying a camera, began to broadcast his crime on the Twitch platform, which declared itself “devastated” and promised “zero tolerance against all forms of violence”.

According to the social network, the content was deleted “two minutes” after it began to be broadcast, the attacker’s account was “permanently suspended” and “all accounts likely to repost this content are under surveillance”.

American media also mentioned a racist “manifesto” posted on the Internet.

According to New York Timesciting this “manifesto”, the suspect was “inspired” by crimes committed by white supremacists, including the 2019 massacre of 51 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“Atrocious killing”

The newspaper Buffalo News even revealed that an insulting, racist and taboo word in the United States to designate black people had been painted in white on the barrel of the weapon. It is an “excruciating killing by a white supremacist,” New York State Governor Kathy Hochul thundered on Twitter.

According to the mayor of Buffalo, an African-American, Byron Brown, the killer traveled several hours to commit his crime.

In a statement, US President Joe Biden denounced the attack, recalling that “any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is contrary to everything we stand for in America”.

Serial shootings and murders in the United States in public places are tragically almost daily and gun crime is on the rise in major cities like New York, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco, especially since the coronavirus pandemic. 2020. In 2021, firearms killed nearly 45,000 people in the United States, including about 24,000 suicides, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive.