USA
Texas gunman suspect arrested
Officials from several agencies have searched in the US state of Texas for the suspect who is said to have shot five people. photo
© Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP/dpa
Again terrible gun violence in the USA: A man is said to have brutally killed five people – including a child. After days of manhunt, the alleged perpetrator is now in police custody.
The alleged shooter wanted after the death of five people in the US state of Texas was caught after fleeing for several days. The suspect Mexican was arrested last night (local time) in Montgomery County, the local sheriff’s office said. Several hundred police officers, squadrons of riders and sniffer dogs were involved in the four-day manhunt for the man in the vicinity of the metropolis of Houston.
The alleged perpetrator shot dead several neighbors late Friday evening in a residential building in the small town of Cleveland. They had previously urged him to stop shooting around his front yard so a baby could sleep. The drunken man refused the request – instead he showed up with his gun in front of the neighbors’ door and caused a real massacre. According to the police, he killed his victims “almost execution-style” – with shots in the head or neck from a short distance.
State with lax gun laws
Among the victims were a child and two women who appeared to have shielded two children from the shots with their bodies. According to the police, a total of ten people were in the house, five of them survived unharmed. The five fatalities are from Honduras and, according to media reports, had moved from Houston to Cleveland, around 70 kilometers away, just a few days earlier.
The gun laws in the conservative state of Texas are particularly lax, even by American standards. Despite countless bloody crimes, the gun lobby, which is extremely powerful in the USA, insists on the right to arm yourself and above all knows that the Republicans in Congress are on their side: they have long blocked a substantial tightening of gun laws in the USA. Tens of thousands of people die from gun violence in the United States every year.