A young man charged with the murder of ten people in a shooting in a US supermarket last spring suffers from mental disorder and is until further notice unfit to stand trial, according to local press.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 22, is accused of having opened fire in March 2021 in the parking lot of the King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado (west) and then inside the store, killing ten people including a police officer who arrived as reinforcement, before being arrested with a leg injury.
He must answer a total of more than a hundred charges for the shooting, for which neither he nor the investigators have been able to provide a reason.
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The young man, from a family of Syrian immigrants and claiming his Muslim religion, had acquired a semi-automatic weapon less than a week before the shooting. A Boulder County judge ruled on Friday that he will need to undergo treatment for mental disorders before his trial can eventually proceed, the
Denver Post
reported
. According to the newspaper, no details were given during the hearing on the nature of the psychological disorders from which the accused suffers, but his lawyer spoke of
"serious mental illness"
. Some relatives of Ahmad Alissa assured shortly after his arrest that he was
"paranoid"
and
"anti-social"
.
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Shootings of this type, especially in schools, shopping malls or places of worship, are a recurring evil of the United States that successive governments have been powerless to stem, not least because of the provisions of the Constitution protecting the rights of the people. US citizens to carry a gun. Colorado has already seen two of the worst killings in American history. In 1999, two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher at their Columbine high school. And in 2012, a heavily armed man shot dead 12 people in a cinema in Aurora. No US state is immune to gun violence. In Michigan (north), a fifteen-year-old teenager is accused of having used a weapon purchased shortly before by his father to open fire in his high school.He killed four students and injured six others as well as a teacher on Tuesday in the grounds of the establishment.