Shooting in an LGBTQ + nightclub in the United States: five dead, the alleged shooter arrested


He “entered the box and immediately started shooting”: a 22-year-old man killed at least five people and injured 18 overnight from Saturday to Sunday in an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs in the United States. The establishment, which bears the name “Club Q”, thanked Sunday on Facebook “the heroic customers who subdued the shooter and put an end to this hateful attack”.

“Two firearms found at the scene”

“At least two firearms were found at the scene. We are still working to identify the firearms and their owner, but I can confirm that the suspect used a rifle,” said the deputy chief of Colorado Springs City Police, Adrian Vasquez. Authorities, at a press conference, did not immediately say whether Anderson Lee Aldrich, arrested and taken to hospital, acted alone. Nor did they give any indication of the possible motive for the killing.

“At least two people in the box confronted him and fought with him. They managed to stop the suspect,” said Adrian Vasquez. The US Federal Police (FBI) has also been asked to assist local police officers in the investigation. The injured were transported to various hospitals in Colorado, a state in the center of the country.

Resurgence of acts hostile to transgender people

The club also said it was “shattered by this senseless attack on our community” while Colorado Governor Jared Polis, the first openly gay governor elected in the United States, said on Saturday he was “horrified and devastated”. The nightclub had announced an LGBT event on Saturday, a party “with all kinds of gender identities and numbers” on the occasion of Transgender Day of Remembrance, celebrated internationally on November 20. This day of mobilization finds its origin in the assassination in 1998 in the United States of the transgender woman Rita Hester.

This new drama is part of a context of resurgence of acts hostile to transgender people, according to statistics from associations and the FBI. On June 12, 2016, an American of Afghan origin, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured around fifty others in a gay club in Orlando (Florida, Southeast), the Pulse.

The killing also illustrates the soaring mortality linked to firearms in a country where they circulate in very large numbers. Since the beginning of the year, 601 mass shootings have been recorded in the United States, including the tragedy in Colorado Springs on Saturday, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive. A mass shooting that she said meant four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.



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