The man accused of shooting two members of the National Guard — one fatally — in Washington last week entered a plea of not guilty on Tuesday, appearing in court remotely from a hospital bed.
The initial appearance in Washington was a first step in the government’s efforts to prosecute Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, a refugee from Afghanistan, days after the death of one of the National Guard members he is accused of shooting. Since the shooting, the Trump administration has seized on the attack to propose an extraordinary ban on legal immigration, barring people from much of the world from entering the United States.
Appearing in the District of Columbia’s local city court, prosecutors said they would charge Mr. Lakanwal with first-degree murder, assault and two additional weapons charges. President Trump and Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, have pledged to pursue more serious federal charges that could carry the death penalty, including terrorism charges. Ms. Pirro said after the hearing that the government was still investigating and might later bring federal charges.
According to court documents, Mr. Lakanwal was shot during a gunfight with a National Guardsman before his arrest.
Ms. Pirro said that Mr. Lakanwal was expected to recover from his injuries, and that the government had not decided whether to seek the death penalty. She said that choice would be left to Pam Bondi, the attorney general.
“That is a very weighty decision,” she said. “That is a decision that comes later in time.”
Terrence Austin, a public defender representing Mr. Lakanwal, told the judge presiding on Tuesday that the government had essentially politicized the case through its public comments about Mr. Lakanwal, potentially tainting the jury pool against him before he had a chance to defend himself in court. He asked that Mr. Lakanwal, who appeared to have no known criminal history before the shooting, be released while awaiting trial.
Renee Raymond, a D.C. Superior Court magistrate judge, said the circumstances of the shooting left “no combination of conditions” by which Mr. Lakanwal could be released.
“He came across country, armed, with a specific purpose in mind,” she said, adding that the “sheer terror that resulted and that continues to animate because of his actions” led her to conclude Mr. Lakanwal should be denied bail.
In court documents filed on Tuesday, another member of the West Virginia National Guard described witnessing Mr. Lakanwal screaming “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is greatest” — while firing a gun, blocks from the White House. The Guard member was talking to the two victims in the moments before they were shot, and saw them fall to the ground, according to the court documents.
Detective Joshua Branson, with the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C., wrote in court documents that surveillance footage showed Mr. Lakanwal standing outside a metro station in Washington for about a minute before running toward an intersection. Other surveillance footage shows him rounding a corner and firing at the two Guard members, as well as an Army National Guard major who was not shot and later jumped on Mr. Lakanwal while he was trying to reload his gun and helped to detain him.
The two West Virginia National Guard members shot in the attack were Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, who was killed, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, who was injured and remains in the hospital.
The violence last week has continued to reverberate in Washington. The Trump administration has ordered hundreds more National Guardsmen to join the more than 2,000 troops already stationed around the city before the shooting. A federal court is expected to decide as soon as this week whether to allow the deployment to remain in the city indefinitely, after a lower court judge had previously declared the deployment illegal and had given the federal government until Dec. 11 to to pull troops out.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has made the attack and Ms. Beckstrom’s ensuing death the basis for a sweeping prohibition on refugee admissions. Immediately after the shooting, the president said the United States had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan, blaming the shooting on a program created by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for Afghan nationals leaving their country after the government fell to the Taliban.
On Thanksgiving, Mr. Trump threatened to place a “permanent pause” on migration from all “third world countries,” making racially charged promises to “denaturalize” migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity” and are “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
Shown on two television screens in the courtroom, Mr. Lakanwal was propped up on a hospital bed and covered in a white blanket, his head resting on a pillow. He is expected to be moved to a jail after he is released from the hospital. During the hearing, he moved his head side to side periodically and told the judge, through a Pashto interpreter, that he understood his rights.
At one point, Mr. Lakanwal began to describe his own injuries.
“I cannot open my eyes, I have pain,” he said through the interpreter, before his lawyer advised him not to speak further.
After the hearing concluded, Ms. Pirro asked an officer in the courtroom if she could meet with the magistrate judge who had denied Mr. Lakanwal bail. The two met briefly out of view of the public — Ms. Pirro said later that she had simply introduced herself and thanked the judge — before Judge Raymond returned to the bench to hear other cases.
Ms. Pirro stated repeatedly that the government knew “very little” about Mr. Lakanwal, predicting that more details would come out through the investigation.
“This individual was brought into this country as a result of the largess of the American people and the American government, and he betrayed us by shooting and killing one individual,” she said.
Judge Raymond ordered Mr. Lakanwal to appear for a preliminary hearing on the morning of Jan. 14.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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