With heavy news coverage, America’s latest mass shooting, which took place at an airport in South Florida, has left at least five people dead and eight more wounded. This is according to local authorities’ most recent report. Witnesses report an anarchic scene as civilians were spotted fleeing from the eventful terminal with others ducking and covering their heads.
‘Too early’ to determine whether it was a terrorist act
Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County, Florida, appeared at a news conference to clear some things up. He confirmed the five deaths and when asked if this airport shooting was a terrorist attack, he said “it’s too early” to tell.
He said that the FBI are interrogating the suspect they have in custody, who they brought in “without incident.” Israel also said there was no sign of another shooter being involved.
The airport will now by closed for “an extended period of time” (according to a tweet posted on the airport’s official Twitter account). The TSA also released a tweet identifying the incident as an “active shooter” at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, just outside Miami, Florida.
Events suggest a second shooter
Over an hour after the suspect was placed in police custody, alarms went off in another terminal and people were caught fleeing in terror by live news cameras that were at the scene before Florida authorities moved in armed with semi-automatic weapons.
Israel clarified this confusing separate incident to some extent at the news conference in Florida, as he explained that while somebody was wounded in the evacuation of the terminal, it had “nothing to do with any type of gunshot or anything like that.”
In an interview with MSNBC, Mayor Barbara Sharief of Broward County, Florida, reported eyewitness accounts from a multi-storey car park who heard “something that sounded like gunshots.” After these were reported, local authorities evacuated and conducted a search of the area.
She confirmed that the investigating authorities have “no confirmation at all that there is another active shooting at the airport.”
The shooter has been identified
While Sharief, Israel, and other Florida authorities have yet to formally identify the shooter, some news outlets used eyewitness accounts of the shooter to identify him.
The suspect was wearing a “Star Wars” t-shirt and apparently took out a handgun at baggage claim and opened fire on everyone, with one witness saying he was “shooting people in the head,” and another saying he went through “about three magazines” before he tossed the gun aside and lay down in the floor awaiting arrest.
While the investigation into the Florida shooting is underway, other airports are being feared as potential targets, with police being “fully deployed” at airports in major US cities such as Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. The FAA has grounded all flights bound for Fort Lauderdale indefinitely.
