EL PASO, Texas 5 August 2019: A man armed with a rifle opened fire at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, killing 30 people and wounding 26 others as panicked shoppers and employees scurried for cover before the gunman surrendered to police at the scene, Reuters has reported.
UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan has sent a cable of condolences to President Donald Trump of the USA, on the victims of the Ohio and Texas mass shootings. According to reports, at least 30 people were killed and dozens injured in the separate mass shooting incidents.
His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, and His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, also sent similar condolences messages to President Trump, said Wam.
Many shoppers in the busy store were buying back-to-school supplies when they found themselves caught up in the latest mass shooting to rock the United States, just six days after a teenage gunman killed three people at a summer food festival in Northern California.
Saturday’s suspect was officially identified as a 21-year-old white male from Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb some 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, which lies along the Rio Grande, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Ciudad Juarez.
Citing law enforcement officials, multiple news media reports named the suspect as Patrick Crusius.
El Paso police chief Greg Allen said authorities were examining a manifesto from the suspect indicating “there is a potential nexus to a hate crime.” Officials declined to elaborate and said the investigation was continuing.
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said three Mexican nationals were among the dead, and six others were among the wounded.
The carnage ranked as the eighth-deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, after a 1984 shooting in San Ysidro, California, that claimed 21 lives.
“We are going to aggressively prosecute it both as capital murder but also as a hate crime, which is exactly what it appears to be,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told reporters, adding, “I don’t want to get ahead of the evidence.”
The suspect surrendered to police as officers closed in on him, and he was taken into custody without incident, authorities said.
