The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has been called in to help investigate a deadly mass shooting in downtown Austin, Texas, on Sunday morning in which a gunman opened fire outside a bar popular with college students, killing two people and wounding 14 others before being shot dead by police.
An FBI official, Alex Doran, told reporters at a news conference that it was too early to determine the shooter’s motivation. But it added that evidence found on the suspect and in his car indicated a “potential nexus to terrorism”, while an intelligence group said the shooter had expressed “pro-Iranian regime sentiment”.
The Associated Press reported that officials had identified the suspect as Ndiaga Diagne, 53, a U.S. citizen who for the first time He came to the United States in 2000 from Senegal, married an American six years later and became naturalized in 2013. He spent a few years in New York before moving to Texas.
Police sources told Reuters that in addition to investigating possible terrorist motivations, investigators are also looking into the suspect’s previous history of mental health problems.
Fox News said it had obtained a photograph of the suspect carrying a rifle and wearing a light-colored sweatshirt that said “Property of Allah.” For its part, the Associated Press reported that a law enforcement official told it that the gunman was indeed wearing that sweatshirt, as well as another with the Iranian flag design.
The Site Intelligence Group said on Sunday that Diagne had expressed “pro-Iranian regime sentiment and hatred toward Israeli and American leadership” in Facebook posts dating back to 2017, and had posted a photo of himself holding what appears to be an assault rifle.
The city’s police chief, Lisa Davis, He described the violence as a “tragic, tragic incident,” and the first calls about it were made to emergency services from Buford’s bar on West Sixth Street at 1:59 a.m. Davis said the gunman drove a large sport utility vehicle, circled the block several times and then fired a gun from the car, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
The shooter then got out of the truck with a rifle and continued shooting, Davis said.
Police responded within 57 seconds of the first emergency call, according to officials. When officers arrived at the bar, they were immediately confronted by an armed man pointing a gun at them, Davis said at an early morning news conference. They returned fire and killed the suspect.
By then, two patrons of the bar had been murdered. Fourteen more people were shot and injured requiring hospital treatment, three of whom were in critical condition.
Videos taken inside the bar and posted on social media showed several people lying on the floor being treated by paramedics. In the video, a woman who was administering CPR to a person who was lying on her back can be heard shouting, “Please help me, I need help!”
The Austin American-Statesman newspaper reported that the gunman had used a handgun and an assault rifle in the shooting, citing authorities. A SWAT team was present Sunday afternoon at a home believed to be linked to the suspect in Pfulgerville, Texas, the newspaper said.
As the FBI deepened its investigation into possible terrorist motives behind the mass shooting, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a statement that explicitly referenced possible threats linked to US and Israeli attacks on Iran. He specifically warned “anyone who thinks about using the current conflict in the Middle East to threaten Texans or our critical infrastructure.”
Abbott said Texas would respond to any such hostility “with decisive and overwhelming force to protect our state.”
The governor has ordered the Texas national guard and law enforcement to increase patrols and surveillance throughout the state.
Austin is the capital of the state of Texas with just over 1 million inhabitants. Its mayor, Kirk Watson, told reporters he was grateful for the quick response of public safety officers.
Austin Emergency Medical Services Chief Robert Luckritz said that over the weekend police officers and paramedics were routinely embedded in the city’s downtown entertainment district, which meant they were able to respond within seconds.
Eyewitnesses and bystanders spoke of the horrific nature of the attack. “I heard screaming, yelling and crying,” Jeremiah Carbajal, a janitor at a nearby residential building, told the Austin American-Statesman.
As investigators begin the painstaking work of searching for evidence of the shooter’s motives, others blamed Texas’ lax gun laws, while Texas Republicans, including the governor, blamed the shooting on immigration policies.
“Stop talking about how great ‘legal’ immigration is,” wrote Chip Roy, a Republican congressman whose district includes South Austin, in all caps on the X, with the suspect’s photo posted online by Fox News. “It’s killing us. Literally.”
Despite Roy’s claim, data analyzed by the Cato Institute indicate that foreign-born people are no more likely to commit mass shootings than native-born Americans.
Instead, Texas Democrats blamed the latest mass shooting on the state’s lackluster gun safety laws.
Greg Casar, a Democrat who represents parts of Austin in Congress, called for action to “end the epidemic of gun violence in America.”
“Americans should be able to have fun at a bar without it turning into an unspeakable nightmare like this,” Casar said in a statement.
Everytown, the advocacy group working to end gun violence, ranks Texas 32nd out of 50 states for its weak gun control systems.
The group notes that five of the worst mass shootings in the last decade have taken place in Texas, and accuses state lawmakers meeting in Austin of continuing to “sit idly and refuse to enact critical gun safety laws.”
The state of Texas filed a lawsuit last year that temporarily blocked a Biden-era federal regulation that was aimed at closing the so-called gun show loophole, which allows people to buy firearms at gun shows without undergoing the FBI criminal background check required for a commercial sale. Like most U.S. states, Texas allows residents to sell guns to each other privately without background checks, carry concealed weapons without a permit, and purchase semi-automatic rifles without restrictions on magazines.
The Gun Violence Archive, which maintains one of the most authoritative databases on gun violence in the United States, has recorded 56 mass shootings in the country so far this year as of early Sunday morning. The site defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more victims are shot to death, not including the attacker.
Austin was not the only American city affected by gun violence in the early hours of Sunday. At least nine people were injured in a shooting in Cincinnati that took place around 1 a.m. at a music venue, Riverfront Live.
All of the victims in that case were taken to nearby hospitals with non-life-threatening gunshot wounds. There was no immediate information on a suspect in that shooting.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
