American police seemed to have identified Sunday a gunman of Asian origin suspected of having killed ten people the night before in a bar near Los Angeles, whose customers were celebrating the Lunar New Year.
According to several local media, which broadcast live footage taken by helicopter, a white van in which the suspect is believed to be was blocked front and back by armored law enforcement vehicles in the city of Torrance , south of Los Angeles, just over 40 km from Monterey Park, a predominantly Asian city where the killings took place.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna announced earlier in Monterey Park that law enforcement had launched a hunt to find the perpetrator of the attack, whose motive is still unknown.
Law enforcement responded to initial emergency calls at 10:20 p.m. local time Saturday and discovered victims and patrons in the bar’s parking lot, Sheriff Luna told a conference call. press Sunday morning in this city of 60,000 inhabitants in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
The police entered the scene and “found numerous shooting victims”.
The 10 people who died are five women and five men, but have not yet been identified, Luna said.
“At least 10 additional victims have been taken to hospital,” he said, adding that “their condition ranges from stable to critical.”
“At this hour, our very preliminary description [du suspect] is that of a man of Asian origin,” added the sheriff.
CCTV footage released by police to identify the suspect shows an Asian man wearing a beanie and wearing glasses.
“New Chinatown”
At the scene of the bar, sheriff’s officers were still working on the crime scene in the early morning of Sunday, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP), and the surroundings were cordoned off by a security perimeter.
Nearby, above a row of red lanterns, a banner wished residents a “Happy Year of the Rabbit.”
“It’s really very sad,” said Ken Nim, who came to walk his dog in the early morning.
“It’s the first time they’ve held the festival since the pandemic,” the employee of an IT company, who has lived in Monterey Park for more than twenty years, told AFP.
According to him, this residential suburb, which he calls the “new Chinatown” of Los Angeles, is a “place where not much normally happens. »
Indicating to pray with his wife Jill for the victims of the shooting, the American president, Joe Biden, said he was “monitoring the situation closely”, in a tweet.
Investigators were also verifying reports of a possible link to an attempted shooting that same evening at another bar in nearby Alhambra.
“A suspect of Asian origin entered the dance hall with a weapon that was snatched from his hands before he fled,” said Sheriff Robert Luna.
The weapon found “is not an assault rifle,” he said.
Loaded with ammunition
Saturday evening, tens of thousands of people had just gathered near the scene of the shooting in Monterey Park for the Lunar New Year festivities, planned over two days and particularly important for the Asian community.
According to the owner of a nearby restaurant quoted by the Los Angeles Times, three people ran into his establishment at the time of the shooting and asked him to lock the door.
These three people said that there was a man with a semi-automatic rifle and loaded with ammunition who reloaded his weapon regularly, Seung Won Choi told the newspaper.
According to Sheriff Luna, investigators have not yet determined whether the victims were targeted because of their backgrounds.
“All avenues are being considered. We don’t know if this is a hate crime as defined by law,” he said.
“Hate crime” in the United States refers to an act against a person targeted for elements of their identity such as race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or disability.
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
That same Saturday evening, 12 people were injured by bullets in a nightclub in Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, a new illustration that no place in American daily life seems immune.
About 49,000 people died from firearms in 2021 in the United States, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.