The young white supremacist accused of carrying out a racist massacre on May 14 by murdering ten black people in Buffalo, on the border between the United States and Canada, was charged on Wednesday with an act of “domestic terrorism” by justice of New York State.
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Payton Gendron, 18, had been on trial since the day of his attack on a Buffalo supermarket for “premeditated murder”, an initial charge to which he had pleaded “not guilty”.
After a first appearance of a few minutes on May 19 before a judge in Buffalo court, a grand jury charged him on Wednesday with, among other things, “murder”, “attempted murder”, “racist hate crime” and act of “domestic terrorism”, according to the prosecution of Erie County, on the shores of the eponymous lake shared by the United States and Canada.
The young man, in detention since May 14, will appear Thursday afternoon to be served with all his criminal charges.
This racist massacre at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo left ten dead and three injured, 11 of whom were black people. It was meticulously prepared for months, as hundreds of internet posts from the alleged killer show.
The young man had also made a reconnaissance trip to Buffalo in March from his home 300 km further south.
In his messages and a racist, supremacist and conspiratorial manifesto attributed to him, Mr. Gendron had thus written several months before the massacre that he wanted to kill black people and that he was targeting a poor and isolated neighborhood of Buffalo because of its high proportion of African Americans.
He had also prepared his attack, minute by minute, planning a military outfit, a camera and the broadcast of his crime on the Twitch platform.
The United States is still reeling from this killing and the semi-automatic rifle massacre at a school in Uvalde, Texas of 19 children and two teachers on May 24 by another 18-year-old before he was shot dead by the police.
