“He was upset about Black Lives Matter”, Brown said, adding that the man cited the recent killings of black people and said that he wanted to kill white people – particularly white police officers.
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Law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told CNN that Johnson was the dead gunman.
Police Chief David Brown blamed “snipers”, but it was unclear how many shooters were involved in Thursday’s attack.
Other suspects might still be at large. He says the suspect expressed anger over recent killings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.
Though police said the gunman professed to be acting alone, three suspects were in custody.
One suspect was killed by a robot with a bomb that police sent into a parking garage.
Brown said police don’t have a motivation for the attacks or any information on the suspects.
This is being called the deadliest attack on police officers since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers in NY. It also drew a comparison with the November day in 1963 when a US president was slaughtered by a sniper on a Dallas street only a few blocks away.
At least 12 officers were shot as gunfire continued between police and snipers, and all seven who were wounded have been released from the hospital.
Police were still not certain they knew all of the individuals involved in the attack, he said.
The shooting began while hundreds of people were gathered to protest the week’s fatal police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota.
Of the five officers who died, the first to be named is Brent Thompson, who worked at the Dallas Area Rapid Transit.
“We’re hurting, our profession is hurting, Dallas officers are hurting”, Brown said. “I also said yesterday that our police have an extraordinarily hard job and the vast majority of them do their job in outstanding fashion”.
“I just got out of the interrogation room for 30 minutes, where police officers lying, saying they have video of me shooting, which is a lie, saying that had witnesses saying I shot a gun, which is a lie”. The officers include Dallas Police and Dallas Area Rapid Transit officers.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said one of wounded officers had a bullet go through his leg as three members of his squad were fatally shot around him. Officers negotiated for hours before there was an exchange of fire and, eventually, the police detonated a robot bomb.
6 a.m. – President Obama, on a trip to a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation meeting in Poland, says the attacks are, “vicious, calculated, and despicable”.
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A report released a year ago by the Better Government Association found that Dallas, the ninth biggest city in the country, had the third-highest rate of deadly police shootings in a selection of 10 large cities between 2010 and 2014, according to the Texas Observer. “[.] There must have been five times tonight – whenever we thought we were safe, people said ‘Run, people were shot!'”
