US varsity shooting suspect found dead, police say

A man believed to be behind both a mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor has been found dead after a days-long manhunt, authorities said on Thursday.

The suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, was a 48-year-old Portuguese national who had once studied physics at Brown University, officials announced at press conferences in Providence and Boston.

There was no immediate indication of a motive in the twin shootings at two of the top universities in the United States, which rattled elite New England campuses.

The suspect’s body was found at a storage unit in New Hampshire along with two firearms. He died by suicide, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said.

Neves Valente, who had been a permanent U.S. resident since 2017, is believed to have acted alone.

“Tonight, our Providence neighbours can finally breathe a little bit easier,” Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters.

On December 13, the shooter burst into a building at Brown, an Ivy League school in Rhode Island, where students were taking exams, and opened fire, killing two people and wounding nine others.

The victims were identified as Ella Cook, vice president of Brown’s Republican Party association, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, originally from Uzbekistan, who had hoped to become a neurosurgeon.

Six of the wounded were still in hospital in stable condition, while three had been released, Brown University President Christina Paxson said in a statement late on Thursday.

Then, on December 15, Nuno Loureiro — a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — was fatally shot in his home in Brookline, in the greater Boston metropolitan area.

For days, investigators appeared to have little to go on, releasing images of a person of interest and another individual seen standing nearby in an effort to trace them.

Officials gave daily media updates in which they voiced increasing frustration over the fruitless manhunt.

The case later advanced following a trail of financial data and video surveillance footage gathered from both scenes.

‘Hiding his tracks’

The groundwork that started in the city of Providence … led us to that connection,” Perez said.

In Boston, federal prosecutor Leah Foley, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said Neves Valente had been “sophisticated in hiding his tracks.”

She said he switched the licence plates on his rental vehicle at one point and used a phone that investigators initially had difficulty tracking, though the pieces eventually began to fall into place.

Authorities initially detained a different man in connection with the shooting but later released him.

Brown University has faced questions, including from U.S. President Donald Trump, about its security arrangements after it emerged that none of its 1,200 security cameras were linked to police surveillance systems.

There have been more than 300 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot.

Efforts to restrict access to firearms continue to face political deadlock.

Nothing can fully bring closure to the lives that have been shattered by last weekend’s gun violence,” Paxson said.

“Now, however, our community has the opportunity to move forward and begin a path of repair, recovery and healing.”

(AFP)