(Reuters) – Members of the Sikh religious community are “among those” dead and wounded in a Thursday night shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis that claimed the lives of eight workers, a community group said on Friday. [L1N2M908E]
“The Sikh Coalition is deeply saddened to learn that Sikh community members are among those injured and killed,” the New York-based Sikh Coalition group tweeted on Friday. It did not provide any further details on victims.
“We expect that authorities will conduct a full investigation – including the possibility of bias as a factor,” the group added.
The massacre is the most recent in a series of U.S. mass shootings that has again pushed the issue of gun violence to the political foreground.
Eight people were shot to death at three day spas in the Atlanta area in mid-March, raising fears that the gunman had targeted Asian Americans amid a rise in hate crimes. Days later, a gunman killed 10 people at a Colorado grocery store.
FBI Indianapolis Special Agent in Charge Paul Keenan said it would be “premature to speculate” on the motive of the gunman, a 19 year-old former employee.
Most of the world’s roughly 25 million Sikhs live in the northern Indian state of Punjab, according to the Sikh Coalition web site. An estimated 500,000 Sikhs live in the United States.
(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; editing by Diane Craft)
