Sniper police 'close to arrest'

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Investigators seal off the area where the woman was shot dead

Police hunting a sniper in the Virginia suburbs today hinted they could be close to an arrest after confirming a ninth killing.

Investigators said the murder of a woman in the car park of a home improvement store was "conclusively" linked by ballistic evidence to eight other killings.

They also revealed that at least one witness may have seen the man as he fired and fled the scene in a light-coloured van. Several other witnesses were also said to have caught a partial view of the van's number plate, reported to be from Maryland where six of the 11 shootings have taken place.

Fairfax County police chief, Tom Manger, said today he was "confident that this information will lead us to an arrest in this case".

Linda Franklin, 47, from Arlington, died last night from a single gun shot wound to the head as she loaded her car with her husband.

The killing came almost exactly a week after a 13-year-old boy was badly wounded outside a school in Bowie, Maryland. Police have so far been unable to rule out a link to terror organisations, including al Qaeda.

Ballistic tests on a bullet recovered from Mrs Franklin's body were a perfect match to .233 slugs used in the other shootings over the past 13 days.

As if taunting the more than 1,000 officers involved in the hunt, the gunman targeted Mrs Franklin in a ground-floor car park at a branch of the Home Depot in Falls Church, Virginia. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Witnesses said they heard a single shot and saw Mrs Franklin crumple to the ground. Within minutes the immediate area and motorways were sealed off in what was clearly a well-planned police operation in anticipation of another strike.

There were conflicting reports both of an olive-skinned man and a white man with a blue shirt seen carrying a rifle.

Motorways north and west of Washington were blocked off by police, who were stopping all vehicles and recording their number plates. Officers with bloodhounds could be seen searching a grassy knoll by a church on the other side of the main highway opposite the car park as a possible hiding spot for the sniper.

An alert was also issued for a cream Chevrolet Astro van, possibly with a broken tail-light, that was seen speeding away from the scene. The description was almost identical to that of a white van spotted at some early shootings.

The latest killing is only a few miles from Rockville, Maryland, where five people were killed in 16 hours on 2 October, the start of a random shooting spree that has brought terror to the middle-class suburbs of Washington, and which has seen outdoor events cancelled and schools ordered to keep pupils indoors.

Two more people were shot dead last Wednesday and Friday and, while there were hopes that the killings had ended after two days without further incident, it now seems that the sniper is simply following a pattern in which he rests at the weekend. All the shootings have taken place either in the early morning or evening using a .233 bullet and either a hunting or an assault rifle.

The difficulty of some of the shootings, especially the murder of a middle-aged man at a petrol station on Friday morning, leads police to suspect he may have training as a marksman. Earlier, President Bush called the killings "cold-blooded" and said: "The idea of moms taking their kids to school and sheltering them from a potential sniper attack is not the America I know."

A specialist "sniper squad" with local police members of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms poured into the shopping centre after last night's shooting. The random nature of the murders does not fit with the pattern of any known serial killer, leading to speculation that it could be the work of an al Qaeda cell.

 

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