Posted on 10/15/2002 10:27:10 AM PDT by RAT Patrol
This is LONDON
15/10/02 - News and city section
Sniper police 'close to arrest'
Police hunting a sniper in the Virginia suburbs today hinted they could be close to an arrest after confirming a ninth killing.
Investigators said the murder of a woman in the car park of a home improvement store was "conclusively" linked by ballistic evidence to eight other killings.
They also revealed that at least one witness may have seen the man as he fired and fled the scene in a light-coloured van. Several other witnesses were also said to have caught a partial view of the van's number plate, reported to be from Maryland where six of the 11 shootings have taken place.
Fairfax County police chief, Tom Manger, said today he was "confident that this information will lead us to an arrest in this case".
Linda Franklin, 47, from Arlington, died last night from a single gun shot wound to the head as she loaded her car with her husband.
The killing came almost exactly a week after a 13-year-old boy was badly wounded outside a school in Bowie, Maryland. Police have so far been unable to rule out a link to terror organisations, including al Qaeda.
Ballistic tests on a bullet recovered from Mrs Franklin's body were a perfect match to .233 slugs used in the other shootings over the past 13 days.
As if taunting the more than 1,000 officers involved in the hunt, the gunman targeted Mrs Franklin in a ground-floor car park at a branch of the Home Depot in Falls Church, Virginia. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Witnesses said they heard a single shot and saw Mrs Franklin crumple to the ground. Within minutes the immediate area and motorways were sealed off in what was clearly a well-planned police operation in anticipation of another strike.
There were conflicting reports both of an olive-skinned man and a white man with a blue shirt seen carrying a rifle.
Motorways north and west of Washington were blocked off by police, who were stopping all vehicles and recording their number plates. Officers with bloodhounds could be seen searching a grassy knoll by a church on the other side of the main highway opposite the car park as a possible hiding spot for the sniper.
An alert was also issued for a cream Chevrolet Astro van, possibly with a broken tail-light, that was seen speeding away from the scene. The description was almost identical to that of a white van spotted at some early shootings.
The latest killing is only a few miles from Rockville, Maryland, where five people were killed in 16 hours on 2 October, the start of a random shooting spree that has brought terror to the middle-class suburbs of Washington, and which has seen outdoor events cancelled and schools ordered to keep pupils indoors.
Two more people were shot dead last Wednesday and Friday and, while there were hopes that the killings had ended after two days without further incident, it now seems that the sniper is simply following a pattern in which he rests at the weekend. All the shootings have taken place either in the early morning or evening using a .233 bullet and either a hunting or an assault rifle.
The difficulty of some of the shootings, especially the murder of a middle-aged man at a petrol station on Friday morning, leads police to suspect he may have training as a marksman. Earlier, President Bush called the killings "cold-blooded" and said: "The idea of moms taking their kids to school and sheltering them from a potential sniper attack is not the America I know."
A specialist "sniper squad" with local police members of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms poured into the shopping centre after last night's shooting. The random nature of the murders does not fit with the pattern of any known serial killer, leading to speculation that it could be the work of an al Qaeda cell.
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Find this story at http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/1600750?version=1 ©2002 Associated New Media
If that's true, then I guess the shooters in this cell are converts, mercenaries, or such non-Arab Moslems as Chechens or Bosnians. But that doesn't rule out other members of the cell -- drivers, comms technicians, etc. -- being Arabs.
Somehow they managed to hijack four airplanes and fly three of them into buildings. Taunting an enemy probably only revs them up to prove you wrong...ala Chief Moose saying that the children were safe in school.
One Pali sniper last summer killed 11 IDF troops in 25 minutes at an IDF road block and escaped.
But shooting civilians at 200 yards? A chimpanzee can be trained to do that.
But that was plenty.
One more reason to despise X42. The harm he did our country is incalculable.
I know it is ill-advised to discount your enemy, but...I'm sure glad we aren't locking horns with the Chinese right now. They wouldn't have screwed around with the WTC, and if they had set out to destroy our economy, it would have been done by now.
When W got elected I was afraid the Chinese (and everyone else) would have moved on the ROC, ROK, and any where else they wanted before we could re-arm. That would have been seen as the best time to attack, Sun Tzu mentioned a similar situation with the enemy column marching half it's length across a stream.
Unfortunate Freudian slip of the day: "target a specific group"
Is that something like the "light at the end of tunnel?"
Posted by tracer to Rodney King
On News/Activism Oct 15 10:20 AM #1,683 of 1,692
There are a few scoped handguns in .223 -- the Lone Eagle for example. I've plinked with one out West some years ago and found it to be quite accurate at 100 yards.
An example of the characteristics of such a .223 round can be found at handgunhunt.com:
"Over the long haul, the 40gr. Nosler Ballistic Tip with Blue Dot Powder is my hands down favorite for the 10" .223 Contender. This load is quite accurate, and as can be seen, only gives up a little velocity to the IMR-4198 Load. This load is so mild to shoot, while still offering excellent performance in the 10" barreled .223 Handguns it is hard to imagine. What has endeared me to the 40gr. Nosler Ballistic Tip / Blue Dot load is the mild report, almost nonexistent recoil, and the fact that it does not heat up the barrel as quickly as other loads do. This is extremely important to the Varmint Hunter sitting in the midst of a Prairie Dog Town, or for that matter, a heavily populated Flicker Tail Gopher patch."
Such a pistol is quite concealble and potentially in-your-face" when compared to an AR-15 longgun and would be a good choice for the goblin sniper(s) in question........
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