18-year-old gunman kills 10 at New York grocery

US: An 18-year-old white gunman shot 10 people to death and wounded three others at a grocery store in a Black neighbourhood of Buffalo, New York, before surrendering after what authorities called an act of “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Injured people lie on the ground following a mass shooting in the parking lot of the grocery store.

Authorities said the suspect, who was armed with an assault-style rifle and appeared to have acted alone, drove to Buffalo from his home several hours away to launch a Saturday afternoon attack that he broadcast in real time on social media platform Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com.

Eleven of the 13 people struck by gunfire were Black, officials said. The two others were white. The racial breakdown of the dead was not made clear.

Court papers named the suspect as Payton Gendron of Conklin, a town of about 5,000 people in New York’s Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border.

He was arraigned hours after the shooting in state court on first-degree murder charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said later. New York has no capital punishment. Flynn said the judge also ordered Gendron to remain in custody without bail and to undergo a “forensic examination.” Gendron was scheduled to return to court on May 19.

Authorities said the teenager, reported by local media to have been a student at the State University of New York’s Broome Community College near Binghamton, had come close to taking his own life before he was arrested.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul told a late-evening news conference she was dismayed that the killer managed to livestream his attack on social media, which she blamed for hosting a “feeding frenzy” of violent extremist ideology. – THE INDIAN EXPRESS