The FBI is examining ties between white supremacist movements and a US army veteran who killed six people as they gathered at a Sikh place of worship in Wisconsin on Sunday.
The police identified the gunman as Wade Michael Page, 40, who served in a US army psychological operations unit before he was discharged in 1998 for a pattern of misconduct, including being drunk on duty.
President Barack Obama said on Monday that Americans need to do more "soul searching" to find ways to reduce violence in the wake of the shooting, which is being treated by the FBI as an act of "domestic terrorism".
Page was shot dead by a policeman after badly wounding another officer at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek.
The authorities said Page was the only gunman. An earlier "person of interest" who was said to have appeared at the scene has been identified and ruled out of the inquiry.
The Oak Creek police chief, John Edwards, said it is premature to ascribe a motive, but some in the Sikh community said they feared Page confused them for Muslims. Witnesses to the shooting described him as wearing a tattoo commemorating 9/11. Photographs also show him posing in front of a Nazi flag.
"Maybe he hated our community for the wrong reasons," Amrit Dhaliwal, a local doctor and member of the Oak Creek temple, told the Guardian. "He may have thought putting a turban on was something else. We want to know: why did it happen?"
In the days following the 9/11 attacks, there were four attacks on Sikhs in the Milwaukee area.
"It's pretty much a hate crime," Ven Boba Ri, one of the temple's committee members, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It's sad – I don't know how to describe it. Sikhism is such a peaceful religion. We have suffered for generations, in India and even here."
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, suggested the community might have been targeted by Page because of a broader prejudice as it described him as a "frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white-power band" called End Apathy.
Witnesses said Page "did not speak – he just began shooting". Using a semi-automatic pistol, he fired shots in rapid succession. He was carrying several magazines of bullets. Some of the congregants hid in cupboards. Children cowered downstairs and several women barricaded themselves in the building's kitchen. The victims included an 84-year-old man and a 41-year-old woman. Four of the dead were found inside the temple and three outside.
Among the dead was the temple president, Satwant Kaleka, who arrived in the US in 1982 largely penniless and built a successful petrol-station business. His son, Amardeep, said Kaleka, 65, was shot twice after tackling Page and then hid in a room where he died.
Kaleka was a founder of the temple, which opened five years ago to accommodate the area's expanding Sikh community. "It was like a second home to him," said Amardeep Kaleka. "He was the kind of person who, if he got a call that a bulb was out at 2am he'd go over to change it."
Two custodians, or granthi, were also killed, including Parkash Singh, who recently brought his wife and children from India to live in Wisconsin. Another victim who was hit stumbled to a nearby house, where Jim Haase opened the door to find an elderly man covered in blood from a bullet wound. "He couldn't speak English but he was pointing at it [the wound]," Haase told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal.
Haase, a former soldier, laid the man on his lawn and pressed a towel on the wound to stem the bleeding.
The four men killed were named as Bhai Seeta Singh, 41; Bhai Parkash Singh, 49; Bhai Ranjit Singh, 39; Subegh Singh, 84. The dead woman was identified as Parmjit Kaur Toor, 41.
Of the six victims, four were Indian nationals, the country's ambassador to the US, Nirupama Rao, was told by the FBI.
The police officer wounded by Page was named as Lieutenant Brian Murphy, 51. Murphy was ambushed by the shooter as he went to tend to a wounded person. He was shot eight or nine times at close range. Edmonds commended his heroism as it emerged that he urged colleagues to help others, despite being seriously injured himself.
Steve Saffidi, the mayor of Oak Creek, said that what he called the "heroic action of the police" prevented many more people being killed.
Kuldip Singh, president of US chapter of United Sikhs, an international non-profit organisation, who has spent the past day in Oak Creek, said there was to find and send trauma counselors, preferably Sikhs, who could speak to a community grappling with fear and insecurity. Singh said: "The wife of a victim was so shattered – she had seen her husband in a pool of blood and could not even speak. I met others who are too scared to say anything, too scared to go out of their homes. People in the community are asking, 'Why did this happen, why us?'"
Singh also named two people at the temple on Sunday morning, Punjab Singh and Santokh Singh, as being among those critically injured and receiving medical treatment. "Punjab Singh had arrived not very long ago from Amritsar, India. He would do the discourses at the gurudwara," Singh said.
Earlier in the day, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton spoke to India's external affairs minister S M Krishna and expressed her shock and sadness over the killings. The Indian embassy's spokesperson in Washington, Virender Paul, told the Guardian that officials from the Indian consulate in Chicago had visited the community, were working with US authorities, and would extend consular assistance to the affected families.
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