OAK CREEK, Wisconsin, Aug 6: The gunman who killed six people inside a Sikh temple in the U.S. and was killed in a police shootout was a 40-year-old Army veteran, officials said Monday, and a civil rights group identified him as a "frustrated neo-Nazi" who led a white supremacist band.
Police called Sunday´s attack an act of domestic terrorism.[break]
The shooter was Wade Michael Page, said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Haanstad in Milwaukee. Page joined the Army in 1992 and was discharged in 1998, according to a U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information about the suspect.
Officials and witnesses said the gunman walked into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin and opened fire as several dozen people prepared for Sunday morning services. Six were killed, and three were critically wounded.
Page was a "frustrated neo-Nazi" who led a racist white supremacist band, the Southern Poverty Law Center said Monday. Page told a white supremacist website in an interview in 2010 that he had been part of the white power music scene since 2000, when he left his native Colorado and started the band, End Apathy, in 2005, the civil rights organization said.
He told the website his "inspiration was based on frustration that we have the potential to accomplish so much more as individuals and a society in whole," according to the SPLC. He did not mention violence in the interview.
Page joined the military in 1992 and was a repairman for the Hawk missile system before switching jobs to become one of the Army´s psychological operations specialists, according to the defense official.
So-called "Psy-Ops" specialists are responsible for the analysis, development and distribution of intelligence used for information and psychological effect; they research and analyze methods of influencing foreign populations.
Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was among bases where Page served.
Joseph Rackley of North Carolina told The Associated Press that Page lived with his son for about six months last year in a house on Rackley´s property. Wade was bald and had tattoos all over his arms, Rackley said, but he doesn´t remember what they depicted.
He said he wasn´t aware of any ties Page may have had to white supremacists.
Witnesses to Sunday´s shooting said the gunman looked like he had a purpose and knew where he was going.
Satpal Kaleka, wife of the temple´s president, Satwant Singh Kaleka, saw the gunman enter, according to Harpreet Singh, their nephew.
"He did not speak, he just began shooting," said Singh, relaying her description.
Worshippers said they had never seen the man at the temple before.
"We never thought this could happen to our community," said Devendar Nagra, 48, whose sister escaped injury by hiding as the gunman fired in the temple´s kitchen. "We never did anything wrong to anyone."
Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards said the FBI will lead the investigation because the shootings are being treated as domestic terrorism, or an attack that originated inside the U.S.
Edwards said the gunman "ambushed" one of the first officers to arrive at the temple as the officer tended to a victim outside. A second officer then exchanged gunfire with the suspect, who was fatally shot.
The wounded officer was in critical condition along with two other victims Sunday night, authorities said. Police said the officer was expected to survive.
Tactical units went through the temple and found four people dead inside and two outside, in addition to the shooter.
Jatinder Mangat, 38, another nephew of the temple´s president, said his uncle was among those shot, but he didn´t know the extent of his injuries. When Mangat later learned people had died, he said "it was like the heart just sat down."
Gurpreet Kaur, 24, said her mother was among a group of about 14 other women preparing a meal in the temple kitchen when the gunman entered and started firing. Kaur said her mother felt two bullets fly by her as the group fled to the pantry. Her mother suffered what Kaur thought was shrapnel wound in her foot.
"These are people I´ve grown up with," she said. "They´re like aunts and uncles to me. To see our community to go through something like this is numbing."
Many Sikhs in the U.S. worship on Sundays at a temple, or gurdwara, and a typical service consists of meditation and singing in a prayer room where worshippers remove their shoes and sit on the floor. Worshippers gather afterward for a meal that is open to the entire community.
Sikhism is a monotheistic faith founded more than 500 years ago in South Asia. It has roughly 27 million followers worldwide. Observant Sikhs do not cut their hair; male followers often cover their heads with turbans — which are considered sacred — and refrain from shaving their beards. There are roughly 500,000 Sikhs in the U.S., according to estimates. The majority worldwide live in India.
Sikh rights groups have reported a rise in bias attacks since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Washington-based Sikh Coalition has reported more than 700 incidents in the U.S. since 9/11, which advocates blame on anti-Islamic sentiment. Sikhs are not Muslims, but their long beards and turbans often cause them to be mistaken for Muslims, advocates say.
Police in New York and Chicago issued statements saying they were giving Sikh temples in those cities additional attention as a precaution.
Valarie Kaur, who chronicled violence against Sikh Americans in the 2006 documentary "Divided We Fall," said the shootings reopened wounds in a community whose members have found themselves frequent targets of hate-based attacks since Sept. 11.
"We are experiencing it as a hate crime," she said. "Every Sikh American today is hurting, grieving and afraid."
Seven dead in ´terror´ gun attack on US Sikh temple
(AFP)
OAK CREEK, Wis.: A gunman attacked worshippers at a suburban Sikh temple in the midwestern United States, killing at least six people before he was himself shot dead by police.
The police commander at the scene in Oak Creek, near Milwaukee in Wisconsin, said he and federal agents were treating the mass shooting as a suspected act of "domestic terrorism," though the shooter´s motive was unclear.[break]
The attack was the second massacre to shock the United States in under three weeks and will boost pressure on US President Barack Obama and his rival Mitt Romney to address gun control before the November 6 presidential election.
Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards told reporters that officers had responded to a 911 call and raced to the temple, where one of them was "ambushed" and shot several times before a colleague took down the gunman.
The suspect died, as did six others who he had shot in and near the temple. Three men, including the wounded officer, were taken to a Milwaukee hospital, where a medic said they were in "critical condition."
Witnesses described a bloody scene of confusion and terror as the gunman strode into the temple and opened fire as people gathered for Sunday services.
Japal Singh, 29, spoke to several fellow parishioners about what happened and said that while people were still confused, some things were now clear.
A man who dropped his father off at the temple, known to Sikhs as a "gurudwara," said he saw the shooter -- described as a tall white man with a bald head -- kill two people in the parking lot.
"Then he went down inside the temple and then went into the room where the holy scripture is kept and basically shot more people there, multiple people there," said Singh, a combat medic in the US Army reserve.
Witnesses told Singh it was "a horrible place, a lot of blood and basically screams of everybody. Children, women, everybody. It was chaotic inside. People didn´t know what was going on."
Police did not name the shooter, although they had clearly identified him as local and federal officers soon evacuated three blocks of housing in Cudahy, a suburb just north of Oak Creek, while they sealed off his home.
An AFP reporter in Cudahy saw heavily armed officers mounted in the basket on the ladder of a fire truck observing a house from above, while more police cordoned off the neighborhood as a precaution.
"We looked at it, the scope of it and what the implications might be. We are treating it as a domestic terrorist incident," Edwards said, adding that there was thought to have been only one shooter and that the scene was secure.
Dozens of members of the Sikh community descended on the area after reports of the shooting and were held back behind a police cordon, anxiously scanning their cell phones for news of friends and relatives in the temple.
"Our priest, he´s dead. One of my friends´ grandfathers, he´s dead. It´s a very close-knit community. No matter who´s hurt, we´re all family," Harinder Kaur, a 22-year-old student, told AFP.
Factory worker Navreet Raman, 42, said: "It´s terrorizing. It´s our worship place. If church is not a safe place, what is? Nothing is safe."
Raman said it had been lucky that the shooting at taken place at 10:30 am (1530 GMT) -- in the morning -- as the temple would later have been crowded with more than 300 people for afternoon services.
Obama said he and First Lady Michelle Obama had been "deeply saddened" to learn of the shooting, and Romney sent his condolences.
"As we mourn this loss which took place at a house of worship, we are reminded how much our country has been enriched by Sikhs, who are a part of our broader American family," Obama said, in a White House statement.
Police tactical units were on the scene, along with officers from multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The president of the temple, Satwant Kaleka, was shot and was taken to a hospital, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which said the large place of worship had been founded in 1999.
According to religious tradition, Sikh Indians wear turbans to cover their uncut hair and sport long beards. There are reportedly between 500,000 and 700,000 Sikhs now living in the United States.
In the United States they have often been mistaken for Muslims and have been targeted by anti-Islam activists, particularly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Sapreet Kaur, executive director of the Sikh Coalition, which represents the community in the United States, said police should be allowed to investigate but that he suspected a hate crime had taken place.
"There have been multiple hate crime shootings within the Sikh community in recent years and the natural impulse of our community is to unfortunately assume the same in this case," he said.
"Americans died today in a senseless act of violence, and Americans of all faiths should stand in unified support with their Sikh brothers and sisters."
Sunday´s shooting also bore some similarities to a March 2005 incident in nearby Brookfield, Wisconsin that saw a gunman kill seven worshippers at a church service at a hotel, before turning the gun on himself.
Last month, a gunman burst into a movie theater showing the new Batman film in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, and opened fire, killing 12 people and wounding dozens more.
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