Vehicles sit parked at the home and driveway where Deep Rai was shot in the arm Friday, March 3, 2017, in Kent, Wash.
Vehicles sit parked at the home and driveway where Deep Rai was shot in the arm Friday, March 3, 2017, in Kent, Wash.
Kent, WA (Diya TV) — The FBI is offering a helping hand to the Kent Police Department as they investigate the shooting of a Sikh man who claims his attacker told him to “go back to your own country” before he began firing.
A Sunday statement from the FBI’s Seattle office said the agency remains “committed to investigating crimes that are potentially hate-motivated.”
The victim of the Friday shooting was publicly identified as Deep Rai Sunday, information that was shared in a tweet from India’s minister of external affairs, Sushma Swaraj. She also tweeted that Rai is out of danger. “I am sorry to know about the attack on Deep Rai, a U.S. national of Indian origin,” Swaraj tweeted. She said she has spoken to his father, and “He told me that his son had a bullet injury on his arm. He is out of danger and is recovering …”
Meanwhile, police chief Ken Thomas said detectives have been canvassing Kent’s East Hill neighborhood and talking to potential witnesses and area businesses. “We are putting all possible resources toward this investigation,” Thomas told the Seattle Times.
The British Columbia Peoples Party sent a letter to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, condemning the shooting and asking for “immediate actions to prevent such racial crimes in (the) State of Washington.”
Inslee said he had reached out to the Sikh communities in Washington and condemned the shooting, which he said “echoes the disturbing pattern of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-Muslim attacks in our state, and across the country.”
“These acts of violence are hateful, detestable, and un-American,” he added.
The 39-year-old Rai told police he was working on his car in his driveway at around 8 pm when a six-foot-tall white man with a stocky build approached him on foot. The man, according to Rai, was wearing a mask to cover half his face, and told him to “go back to your own country” before he shot Rai in the arm.
The Seattle-area shooting follows the Feb. 22 attack on two Indian computer engineers — Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani — in a Kansas bar that left one dead and was condemned by President Donald Trump as an act of hate about a week later. The Sikh Coalition, a national civil-rights group, asked local and federal authorities to investigate the shooting in suburban Seattle as a hate crime.
