At least 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York grocery store Saturday in an attack that authorities called racially motivated.
The suspect was dressed in military tactical clothes and a helmet, an official told The Associated Press. Buffalo police confirmed he was in custody in a tweet.
The suspect is an 18-year-old white male and a total of 13 people were shot, including three with non-life threatening injuries, local outlet News 4 reported. The shooting took place in a grocery store located in a predominantly black neighborhood, and 11 of the victims are black, an official said.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County sheriff John Garcia told a press conference Saturday. “It was straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
The mass shooting has garnered the attention of the FBI.
“The FBI is assisting in this investigation and has no other information to provide at this time,” a spokesperson for the bureau told VICE News.
The gunman reportedly live-streamed the attack on Twitch, and allegedly wrote a manifesto, which has been circulating online and was obtained by VICE News.
Opening the nearly two-hundred page document is an image of a sonnenrad or sunwheel: known popularly as the ‘Black Sun’ it was a symbol of the Third Reich later popularized by neo-Nazi terror groups, the Christchurch shooter, and is now a shorthand signifier for violent white nationalism in online far-right circles.
The screed makes persistent reference to a perceived “white genocide” and rails against a surge of illegal immigration in the U.S., and nods to a global conspiracy holding that a cabal of Jewish businessmen run world governments. The gunman makes clear that he was inspired by the terrorist who gunned down fifty people at a mosque in New Zealand in 2019, who was himself inspired by other white nationalist terrorists from Canada and Norway.
“The manifesto is interesting for several reasons,” said Amarnath Amarasingam an assistant professor of religion at Queen’s University in Canada and a far-right terrorism expert. “For one, it is dripping with Great Replacement conspiracy theories, about a coming demographic collapse of white Europeans.”
“It copies the Christchurch shooter’s question and answer style as well as the Halle synagogue shooter’s style of providing in depth instructions on how to plan another attack.”
Amarasingam, who along with another source familiar with the neo-Nazi underground confirmed the authenticity of the manifesto, said the most troubling aspect of it was that it shows “these attackers are learning from each other and attempting to emulate each others’ killing sprees. It’s deeply worrisome.”
One of those killed was a recently retired Buffalo police officer who was working at the store as a security guard, The Buffalo News reported.
“It’s like walking onto a horror movie, but everything is real. It is Armageddon-like,” a police officer at the scene told the newspaper. “It is so overwhelming.”
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