•Law-enforcement officers secure the area after a shooting in downtown Washington, on Wednesday
An Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard members will be charged with first-degree murder, a US official said today, in an escalation of charges following the incident that left one Guardsman dead.
The US attorney for Washington, DC, Jeanine Pirro, has identified the assailant as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who the US media described as a member of the “Zero Units”—a CIA-backed counterterrorism group, reports AFP.
“There are certainly many more charges to come, but we are upgrading the initial charges of assault to murder in the first degree,” Jeanine Pirro, the attorney for Washington, DC, told the Fox News program Fox & Friends.
“It is a premeditated murder. There was an ambush with a gun toward people who didn’t know what was coming.”
President Donald Trump has said that Sarah Beckstrom, a 20-year-old West Virginia National Guard member deployed in the US capital as part of his crackdown on crime, died from her wounds.
He said the other soldier wounded in Wednesday’s attack, just blocks from the White House, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, was “fighting for his life.”
“We still have hope,” Pirro said of Wolfe.
“He’s still in critical condition. We are doing everything we can to assist his family.”
Pirro said earlier that Lakanwal opened fire with a .357 Smith and Wesson revolver on a group of guardsmen on patrol near the White House.
He had been living in the western state of Washington and had driven across the country to the capital, she said.
The shooting on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday has brought together three politically explosive issues: Trump’s controversial use of the military at home, immigration, and the legacy of the US war in Afghanistan.
Following the shooting, Trump pledged to suspend migration from what he called “third-world countries” and threatened to reverse “millions” of admissions granted under his predecessor Joe Biden, in a new escalation in his anti-migration stance.
The heads of the FBI, CIA and Homeland Security and other senior Trump appointees all insisted that Lakanwal had been granted unvetted access to the US because of lax asylum policies in the wake of the chaotic final US withdrawal from Afghanistan under former president Biden.
However, AfghanEvac, a group that helped resettle Afghans in the US after the military withdrawal, said they had undergone “some of the most extensive security vetting” of any migrants.
