(New York) One person died and five others were injured Monday after shots were fired on a New York subway platform, police in the American megacity announced.
The dead person is a 34-year-old man and the five injured are two women and three other men, aged 14 to 71, police officers (NYPD) said during a press briefing at the foot of the Skytrain. the New York borough of the Bronx, the most disadvantaged in the city.
It was not a question of a lone shooter who opened fire “at random” on passengers, clarified Commissioner Michael Kemper, in a city marked by the crime in 2022 of a sixty-year-old who had fired into a train of the crowded metro, miraculously leaving only around thirty people injured.
Late Monday afternoon, two groups of young people were “arguing” on a train entering the station when a member of one group pulled out a weapon and opened fire on the platform, just as the carriage doors were opening. opened and passengers got on and off, Kemper said.
The police officer did not give the identity of the victims except to specify that “one of them, a 34-year-old man, unfortunately died” at the hospital.
Among the five injured hospitalized, the New York firefighters (FDNY) counted four “seriously” injured, according to an email to AFP.
The shooter is on the run and police have launched an appeal for witnesses.
At the Mount Eden Avenue station in the Bronx, completely cordoned off, the subway is aerial and an AFP photographer saw a number of police and emergency vehicles. Television footage filmed by drone showed the train stopped and plainclothes police and investigators busy on the platform.
” It is not normal. Shootings like that in the metro network are extremely rare and unacceptable,” assured police officer Mr. Kemper.
Crime and particularly homicides by firearms have been declining in New York since 2022-2023, after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the carrying of weapons in public is strictly regulated there, compared to other cities and states in the United States.