At least ten people have been killed and three injured in a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, United States. The 18-year-old shooter had posted a « racist manifesto » online ahead of the assault.
On Saturday, an 18-year-old white American boy opened fire on customers and employees of a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, United States, killing at least ten people and injuring three, most of them of African Americans. The shooter was arrested by law enforcement.
• Killing in a supermarket, the shooter arrested
The attack was launched on Saturday around 2:30 p.m. local time (8:30 p.m. French time) in the parking lot of a Tops chain supermarket in Buffalo, a city in northern New York State. The shooter, an 18-year-old young man, opened fire on four people. Three of them are dead, one of them is injured.
The teenager then enters the store, which is very busy on a Saturday afternoon, and continues to shoot. A member of the security service, also a retired policeman, intervenes and targets the young shooter. The latter is hit, but without consequence, being protected by a bulletproof vest. He retaliates and kills the ex-law enforcement officer.
The killer then continues his massacre, targeting customers and employees of the shop and kills six other people. A young executive director of the supermarket, Shonnel Harris, present at the scene at the time, told buffalo news having heard at least 70 gunshots. She managed to evade the gunfire by fleeing through the back door of the store.
The shooter was eventually arrested by the police who arrived on the scene. He had threatened to kill himself, turning his gun on himself before giving up.
• An 18-year-old white man behind the assault
If some gray areas remain, several pieces of information on the alleged shooter have leaked out. His confirmed identification is Payton S. Gendron, he is a young white man of only 18 years old, according to the New York Times.
Coming from Conklin, a small town in rural southern New York, he drove more than 300 kilometers to carry out his massacre.
At the time of the assault, visibly very prepared, he was equipped with an « assault weapon », a bullet-proof vest, military-type clothing, a helmet and a camera to broadcast his crime on the internet. At the hands of the police, he was imprisoned and faces the death penalty, according to the local representative of the prosecution of the United States Department of Justice.
• The assault broadcast live on the Twitch platform
Particularity of the killing, the assailant was equipped with a camera at the time of the events and broadcast the assault live on the platform particularly popular with video game enthusiasts Twitch.
The American social network, which belongs to the Amazon group, reacted quickly, ensuring that the content was deleted « two minutes » after the start of its broadcast, the attacker’s account was « permanently suspended » and « all accounts likely to rebroadcast this content are under surveillance ». However, images of the massacre continued to circulate on social networks this Sunday.
The platform also strongly condemned the facts. She said she was « devastated » and promised « zero tolerance against any form of violence ».
• An investigation opened for « crime motivated by hatred and racism »
Among the victims of the killing, eleven were black and two were white. For the police, the racist nature of this crime is not in doubt.
« 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 shortly after the assault at a conference. Press.
Another element supporting the shooter’s white supremacist ideological motivation: the murder weapon was marked with a racist word painted in white on the barrel, according to buffalo news.
Finally, several American media report that the shooter had published a « racist manifesto » on the Internet before the assault. He delivered the detailed plan of his attack, explaining that he had chosen the place of the assault because of the large presence of African-American inhabitants. He also said he was inspired by the massacre perpetrated by white supremacist Dylann Roof in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, killing nine African Americans. The shooter, arrested for first degree murder, has pleaded not guilty.