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Crime scene in Buffalo
Photo: Joshua Bessex/AP
An 18-year-old white gunman who shot dead ten people and injured three others in upstate New York broadcast his violent act live on the internet.
A spokesman for the streaming service Twitch confirmed to the AFP news agency that the perpetrator showed his attack on the platform.
However, the transmission ended less than two minutes after the start of the act of violence from the platform, which belongs to the online group Amazon.
It will now be monitored that other sites do not send the content again.
The federal police FBI assumes a racist motive.
"We are investigating this case for both a hate crime and a violent racially motivated extremism case," Buffalo FBI investigator Stephen Belongia said at a news conference.
Eleven of the 13 dead and injured were African Americans, police said.
"It was clearly a racially motivated hate crime by someone from outside our community," said John Garcia, Sheriff for the Erie County, where Buffalo is located.
The Erie prosecutor's office also spoke of references to "racial hatred" without giving any further details.
Reports on racist »manifesto«
According to US media reports, the authorities are investigating a detailed "manifesto" by the perpetrator, which is said to have been published online before the shooting and in which the man explains his intentions and his racist motives.
According to a report in the local newspaper The Buffalo News, the perpetrator's semi-automatic weapon also bears a racist inscription and the number 14 - a reference to white racists.
The attacker initially shot four people in the parking lot of a Tops supermarket in Buffalo.
Three of them died, according to Buffalo Police Department Joseph Gramaglia.
Then the perpetrator went into the supermarket and continued to fire around.
Among the dead at the store is a retired police officer who worked as a security guard there.
Although the man shot the attacker several times, he was able to return fire because he was wearing a bulletproof vest, as Gramaglia further reported.
The 18-year-old turned the gun on himself when police arrived at the scene, but police said he was eventually persuaded to surrender.
District Attorney John Flynn's office said the perpetrator, who is from Conklin, New York, will be charged with murder.
He faces life imprisonment.
In the words of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, the perpetrator "had traveled hours from out of town to commit this crime."
The crime scene is in a Buffalo neighborhood mostly populated by African Americans.
Tat joins a series of racist murders
The Buffalo bloody crime is one in a series of racially motivated murders in the United States.
In 2019, a white right-wing extremist drove for hours across Texas and shot dead 23 people in El Paso, where a majority of Latinos live.
Four years earlier, a white man opened fire at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people.
In both cases, the perpetrators posted hate-filled "manifestos" on the Internet before their crimes.
Racism by right-wing extremists has been perceived by many people in the USA as a growing and dangerous problem, and not just since the »Black Lives Matter« movement.
The anti-racism organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sees right-wing extremism on the rise in the USA.
The ADL writes that "white supremacists" assumed that whites were in danger of becoming extinct.
They believed that almost all actions that help "save" whites are justified.
US President Joe Biden was horrified by the crime.
One must await the results of the investigation, it said in a statement from the White House.
Irrespective of this, however, there is a "clear, moral truth: a racially motivated hate crime goes against the essence of this nation in a hideous way".
Any domestic terrorism, "including an act committed in the name of the repugnant ideology of white nationalism, goes against everything we stand for in America."
Buffalo is the second largest city in the state after New York City.
The town of around 280,000 residents is just a few kilometers from Niagara Falls.
The falls are a world-renowned tourist attraction.
dab/dpa/AFP
