Five people were killed Saturday night and 18 wounded in a shooting at a bar in the western US state of Colorado frequented by LGBT people, police said, saying a suspect was in custody.
The mass shooting in the city of Colorado Springs is the most recent of its kind in the United States, and it came after a year in which anti-gay rhetoric increased among extremistsaccording to the authorities.
“There was a shooting tonight at a local bar. We received an initial call around 11:57 p.m. that there was a shooting in progress at a local club known as Club Q,” Colorado Springs police spokeswoman Lt. Pamela Castro said.
“There are 18 wounded and five dead,” Castro said, the AFP news agency reported.
Castro added that the agents “located” inside the bar a suspect of having fired the shots.
As detailed by Castro, the suspect was injured and was being treated.
He added that it was not yet clear if he had been shot by police officers who responded to the scene, but he assured that the FBI was on the scene and assisting in the case.
Club Q said it was “devastated by the senseless attack on our LGBT community”.
“We appreciate the quick reactions of the heroic customers who subdued the gunman and ended this hateful attack,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
The motive behind the shooting brought back memories of the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Floridawhich killed 49 people.
In June, 31 members of the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front were arrested in the state of Idaho and charged with conspiring to riot a Pride event.
Experts warned that extremist groups could see anti-gay rhetoric as a call to action.
The previous month, a fundamentalist pastor from Idaho told his congregation that the government should execute gay, lesbian and transgender people, aligning himself with similar sermons by a fundamentalist pastor from Texas.
