Tag Archives: Shooting

Five people suspected of shooting at police arrested in Washington DC

(Reuters) – Five people suspected of shooting at police officers before barricading themselves inside a vehicle in Washington D.C. were arrested on Tuesday, police said.

No one was reported injured in the incident, which took place days after five police officers were fatally shot during a demonstration in Dallas to protest at police violence against black men and other minorities.

In the incident in Washington D.C., officers in marked patrol cars were responding to reports of gunshots just after midnight in the southeast of the city when at least one person inside a parked SUV opened fire on the patrol cars, a spokeswoman with the Metropolitan Police Department said.

The officers returned fire, the spokeswoman said, and the five suspects – three women and two men – hid inside the vehicle during a 30-minute standoff before surrendering.

It was not immediately clear why the suspects fired at police or what criminal charges they might face.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Gunmen take hostages at cafe in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter

Gulshan area in Dhaka, Bangladesh

DHAKA (Reuters) – Gunmen attacked a restaurant popular with expatriates in the diplomatic quarter of the Bangladeshi capital on Friday and took hostages, including several foreigners, police said.

Eight to nine gunmen attacked the Holey Artisan restaurant in the upscale Gulshan area of Dhaka, and police were preparing to start an operation to rescue the hostages, said Benjir Ahmed, the chief of Bangladesh’s special police force.

CNN said 20 people were being held in the restaurant.

Ahmed said the assailants had hurled bombs at police. One policeman was dead and two others wounded by gunfire that erupted as they surrounded the restaurant, police said.

A resident near the scene of the attack said he could hear sporadic gunfire nearly three hours after the attack began. “It is chaos out there. The streets are blocked. There are dozens of police commandos,” said Tarique Mir.

Bangladesh has seen an increase in militant Islamist violence over the last year. Deadly attacks have been mounted against atheists and members of religious minorities in the mostly Muslim country of 160 million people, with attackers often using machetes.

Militants killed two foreigners last year, leading several Western firms involved in the country’s $25 billion garment sector to temporarily halt visits to Dhaka.

Both Islamic State and al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for militant attacks in the country. But the government denies foreign militant organizations are involved and blames two local groups, Ansar-al-Islam and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen.

The U.S. State Department said all Americans working at the U.S. mission there had been accounted for. A spokesman said in Washington the situation was “very fluid, very live”.

(Reporting by Serajul Quadir; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Police shoot dead masked man who took hostages in German cinema

German special police during hostage situation

By Ralf Banser

VIERNHEIM, Germany (Reuters) – A masked man took hostages at a cinema in western Germany on Thursday before police stormed the complex and shot him dead, police said.

No other people were injured, a police spokesman said.

The attacker, who carried a rifle or “long gun”, acted alone and appeared to have been a “disturbed man”, the interior minister of Hesse state, Peter Beuth, told the regional parliament.

Police had not identified the man or established his motive, spokesman Bernd Hochstaedter said, adding that nothing immediately pointed to him having a militant background.

German television showed pictures of heavily-armed police, wearing helmets and body armor, storming the Kinopolis complex in Viernheim, south of Frankfurt, and a couple fleeing the building.

Cinema employee Guri Blakaj told Reuters the gunman, who appeared to be aged between 18 and 25 and was about 1.7 meters tall, entered the cinema at around 3 p.m. and told workers to get into an office.

He then went into a cinema theater. Blakaj, who said there were about six workers and 30 cinemagoers in the building, then heard shots fired.

Police special forces stormed the building and shot him.

There was still a heavy police presence at the scene into the late afternoon, and a helicopter circled overhead.

(Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers, Michael Nienaber and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Louisiana officer shot and killed during pedestrian stop

(Reuters) – A Louisiana sheriff’s deputy died of gunshot wounds on Wednesday after being shot three times in the back by a pedestrian he had stopped in a high-crime suburb of New Orleans, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office said.

Sheriff Newell Normand told reporters at a late night news conference that deputy David F. Michel, Jr., 50, got into a struggle with the suspect around noon local time, believing the man was following another individual.

Normand said the suspect, identified as 19-year-old Jerman Neveaux, pulled a revolver and fired a total of three shots into Michel’s back during the confrontation.

Michel, a detective who was assigned to a street crimes unit, died at a local hospital.

“David, I wish I had 1,000 of him,” an emotional Normand said, adding that the shooting was “a cold-blooded murder.”

Neveaux fled into the surrounding neighborhood and was later apprehended.

Bystander video published online by local broadcaster FOX8 showed two of several officers striking a prone Neveaux more than a dozen times as he is arrested, footage which Normand said his office would investigate.

Neveaux was treated for minor injuries at a hospital. Normand said Neveaux admitted to the shooting, saying he was on probation and did not want to go to jail for possessing a firearm.

Michel worked as a reserve deputy for the department starting in 2007 and became a full-time deputy in February of 2013, the office said.

(Reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang and Sandra Maler)

Full Orlando 911 transcript released; gunman pledged allegiance to Islamic State

Makeshift memorial for victims of Pulse shooting

By Barbara Liston

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department and the FBI on Monday released what they said was the complete transcript of the phone conversation between the Orlando, Florida, shooter and 911 police operators as he threatened to strap explosives to his hostages.

The release of the full transcript came a few hours after the FBI had issued an edited transcript of the calls.

In the full transcript, the gunman, Omar Mateen, is quoted pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Mateen, 29, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida on June 12, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. He threatened to detonate a car rigged with bombs and to strap hostages into explosive vests, according to transcripts of the 911 calls he made while police tried to rescue people trapped in the club.

The FBI and Justice Department said they had released a redacted transcript of the conversations because of sensitivity to the interests of survivors and victims’ families, and the integrity of the investigation.

But the first transcript led U.S. House of Representative Speaker Paul Ryan and other politicians to call for the release of a full transcript after a political battle over gun violence brewed in the U.S. Congress.

Mateen’s conversations with a dispatcher and crisis negotiators were made public as police sought to fend off criticism that they may have acted too slowly to end a three-hour standoff at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

“You people are gonna get it and I’m gonna ignite it if they try to do anything stupid,” Mateen said during one of the calls, according to the FBI transcript.

(Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Frank McGurty in New York, and Eric Beech, Mohammad Zargham and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Writing by Fiona Ortiz and Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott)

U.S. to reveal details of Orlando nightclub gunman’s 911 calls

Mourning over Pulse Massacre

(Reuters) – U.S. authorities were due on Monday to release partial transcripts of 911 calls made during last week’s mass shooting by a gunman who slaughtered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, before being killed by police.

Omar Mateen, 29, is said to have paused during a three-hour siege to telephone emergency dispatchers three times and to post internet messages from inside the Pulse nightclub professing his support for Islamist militant groups.

The FBI was due to hold a news conference near the club at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to provide an update on the investigation and to release the partial transcripts of the 911 calls.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said they would include the “substance of his conversations” recorded as Mateen carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but not any pledge of loyalty he is alleged to have made to the Islamic State militant group.

Authorities have said preliminary evidence indicates Mateen, who worked as a security guard, was a mentally disturbed individual who acted alone and without direction from outside networks.

Lynch, who is due to visit Orlando on Tuesday, told CNN on Sunday that investigators have been focused on building a full profile of Mateen, a New York-born U.S. citizen and Florida resident of Afghan descent, who has been described by U.S. officials as “self-radicalized” in his extremist sympathies.

The Pulse massacre, which also left 53 people wounded, led to a week of national mourning and soul-searching over access to firearms and the vulnerability to hate crimes of people in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

While in Orlando, Lynch will meet with investigators, as well as survivors and loved ones of the victims.

The massacre has triggered an effort to break a long-standing stalemate in Congress over gun control.

The Senate was set to vote on Monday on four competing measures – two from Democrats and two from Republicans – to expand background checks on gun buyers and curb gun sales for people on terrorism watch lists.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 presidential election, has said he shares the goal of keeping guns out of the hands of people on watch lists.

Trump said on Monday he was referring to security staff, not patrons, when he said that if more people had been armed in the nightclub, fewer would have died.

(Reporting by David Lawder in Washington and Roselle Chen in Orlando; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott)

Boko Haram shoot dead 18 women at funeral in northern Nigeria

YOLA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Boko Haram militants have shot dead 18 women at a funeral in Nigeria’s northeast, rampaging through a village, setting houses on fire and shooting at random, witnesses and local government officials said on Friday.

The attack took place at about 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) on Thursday in the village of Kuda in Adamawa State. Resident Moses Kwagh told Reuters that people waited until three hours after the attack and had then counted 18 women’s bodies.

Some women were still missing, he said.

A police source confirmed the attack but said it was not yet clear how many people had been killed. The military did not respond to a request for comment.

State lawmaker Emmanuel Tsamdu told Reuters: “I am yet to get the details on how it happened and the real number of people killed. I have sent hunters to go to the area and get me the details because people are afraid to go to the village.”

Kuda is close to the Sambisa Forest, a vast colonial-era game reserve where Boko Haram militants hide in secluded camps to avoid the Nigerian military. The village was attacked by Boko Haram militants in February.

Under President Muhammadu Buhari’s command and aided by Nigeria’s neighbors, the army has recaptured most of the territory seized by Boko Haram, but the group still regularly stages guerrilla attacks.

“When we said that Boko Haram is still in this place some people sit in Abuja and claim that there is no more Boko Haram, but see what has happen,” Kwagh said.

(Reporting by Emma Ande; Writing by Joe Brock; Editing by Louise Ireland)

FBI Investigating California Mass Shooting as Terrorist Act

The FBI is investigating the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, “as an act of terrorism.”

David Bowdich, the assistant FBI director at the bureau’s Los Angeles office, made the announcement at a news conference on Friday, saying the bureau had taken over the investigation’s lead from local authorities.

The revelation came two days after the husband-and-wife team of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people and injured 21 others when they opened fire during a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center. They were later killed in a shootout with police.

Bowdich told reporters that investigators found evidence that indicated “extensive planning,” as well as mentioning the couple’s extensive stockpile of ammunition and explosive devices.

Speaking at a later news conference in Washington, FBI Director James Comey told reporters there was evidence that suggested the Muslim suspects became radicalized, but no evidence had surfaced that suggested that the shooters were part of a terrorist group. However, Comey did say there were indications that the couple might have been inspired by foreign terrorist organizations.

“There’s a lot of evidence in this case that doesn’t quite make sense,” Comey told reporters, adding that investigators were still wading through a large amount of electronic evidence.

Neither Bowdich nor Comey publicly confirmed multiple published reports that said Malik pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State through a post on social media on the morning of the attack.

CNN, FoxNews, The New York Times and The Washington Post were among the media outlets reporting that sources familiar with the investigation told them about the Facebook post.

Bowdich told reporters at the news conference that Farook and Malik “attempted to destroy their digital fingerprints,” and investigators discovered two “crushed” cell phones in trash cans near the crime scene. He said authorities were working to extract data from those cell phones.

“We do hope that the digital fingerprints that were left by these two individuals will take us towards their motivation,” Bowdich told reporters. “That evidence is incredibly important.”

Comey told reporters neither Farook nor Malik was on the FBI’s radar at the time of the shooting.

It was widely reported that Farook worked at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, which was holding a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center at the time of the attack. Police said Farook left the party angrily, then returned with his wife and opened fire.

Farook was born to Pakistani parents in Illinois and met Malik, a Pakistan native who was living in Saudi Arabia, on an online dating site, the New York Times has reported. The couple had a six-month-old daughter who they left with her grandmother on the morning of the attack.

Police have said they found at least 4,500 additional rounds of ammunition and a dozen “pipe-bomb-type devices” at the Redlands, California, residence of the suspects.

The FBI released the crime scene and the couple’s landlord somewhat bizarrely opened it up to the media on Friday morning, leading to several news organizations to take cameras through the residence and broadcast live images of reporters examining the suspects’ personal belongings.

Paris update – Possible 160 or More Murdered in Attacks, Siege at Concert is over

The night has been a terrifying and deadly one for the people of Paris and the country of France.  Although the numbers vary, News reports say that up to 160 people have been in killed and scores injured in numerous attacks beginning at the center of Paris.

Terrorists set off bombs close to the Paris futbol stadium and systematically shot people in and outside of restaurants with AK7 type weapons.

At the same time, the Bataclan theatre, filled with heavy metal concert goers was stormed by armed gunmen.  Over 100 people were held hostage until government troops were able to kill the terrorists  As we are learning from several news sources, many people hid in the balcony areas, lying between seats to escape the horror.  Buses have been brought in to remove survivors from the concert hall area.

According to the BBC,  French radio reporter Julien Pearce was inside the Bataclan theater when gunmen entered. Two men dressed in black started shooting what he described as AK-47s, and after wounded people fell to the floor, the two gunmen shot them again, execution-style, he said. The two men didn’t wear masks and didn’t say anything. The gunfire lasted 10 to 15 minutes, sending the crowd inside the small concert hall into a screaming panic, said Pearce, who escaped. He said he saw 20 to 25 bodies lying on the floor.

One official described “carnage” inside the building, saying the attackers had tossed explosives at the hostages.

Witnesses outside the venue in the 11th arrondissement reported hearing five successive explosions followed by gunshots.

Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman told CNN the death toll in the attacks is going to rise significantly. “We are facing an unknown and historic situation in Paris,” he said.

The exact number of attacks are being investigated at this time. Unsubstantiated reports have stated up to 7 different locations. France has declared a state of emergency and has closed it’s borders.  President Francois Hollande has called for more troops to be brought in as military personnel are being deployed across the city.

As the investigation continues, more information will be provided on the number of gunman, deaths and injuries.