NEW YORK, Apr 18 (APP): Prominent Kashmiri leader Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai has strongly condemned Thursday’s mass shooting at a FedEx centre in the US city of Indianapolis where eight people, including four Sikh-Americans, were killed by a lone gunman, and expressed solidarity with the Sikh community.
In a statement, Dr. Fai, Secretary-General of the Washington-based World Kashmir Awareness Forum, an advocacy group, said he has been in touch with the leadership of the Sikh-American community and expressed his sympathies and condolences with the families of the victims.
He said he told them that Kashmiri-Americans shared the grief of their Sikh brethren as they go through their healing process.
Meanwhile, a Sikh advocacy group has called for an investigation into whether the shooting rampage at FedEx facility was a hate crime.
Law enforcement officials said Friday they have yet to determine what motivated the gunman, 19-year-old Brandon Scott Hole, who was white, to carry out Thursday night’s rampage. Hole killed himself after the shooting spree.
The attack in Indianapolis, capital of the state of Indiana, was the latest in a spate of at deadly mass shootings in the United States over the past month, and follows concerns about anti-Asian violence.
Hole was fired by FedEx sometime last year, and last spring he was briefly placed under psychiatric detention by police when his mother reported her concerns that he was contemplating ‘suicide by cop,’ according to the FBI. A shotgun was seized from his home.
FBI agents who interviewed the teenager last April found no criminal violation at the time and determined he possessed no ‘racially motivated violent extremism ideology,’ said Paul Keenan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office.
But the New York-based Sikh Coalition, a civil rights advocacy group, called for a full investigation into ‘the possibility of bias as factor’ in the FedEx killings.
