Fear stalks Washington area as sniper remains at large

WASHINGTON - The United States military has agreed to join the hunt for a sniper who has been terrorising the Washington area as police said new evidence gleaned from the latest murder could help them catch the serial killer.

A senior defence official said that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had agreed to provide military surveillance aircraft and crews to help hunt for the killer whose latest victim was shot dead on Monday (Tuesday NZ time) while loading her car with shopping bags.

The US military is forbidden by law to provide police duties domestically but the defence official, who asked not to be identified, said Rumsfeld had agreed to a request to provide the military aid.

The official declined to be more specific and stressed that the military would not be directly involved in police work and would be under the supervision of civilian law enforcement.

"We are trying to give as little information as possible to the person on the ground," the official said.

But he added that the surveillance aircraft would be manned with military crews and would be brought in from outside the Washington area which includes parts of Maryland and Virginia.

FBI employee Linda Franklin, aged 47, was killed in front of her husband by a single shot to the head in the parking lot of a Home Depot hardware store in Falls Church, Virginia, west of Washington.

"There was some additional information we were able to get from this case and I am confident that ultimately that information is going to lead to an arrest in this case," Fairfax County, Virginia, police chief Thomas Manger told a news briefing.

Charles Moose, the police chief of Montgomery County in neighbouring Maryland, said Franklin, an FBI intelligence analyst, was not involved in the sniper investigation and was therefore considered yet another random victim.

For the 11th time in less than two weeks, the gunman eluded authorities in spite of the quick deployment of dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agents who shut down major roads around the scene and searched vehicles.

The sniper's random attacks have spread fear in a wide area around Washington since he went on a 15-hour shooting spree on October 2 and October 3, killing five people in the suburban Maryland neighbourhoods, northwest of the US capital, and one in Washington proper.

Two others have been shot dead in the city's southwestern suburbs in Virginia.

The sniper has also wounded two people: a 13-year-old schoolboy in Bowie, Maryland, northeast of Washington, and a woman in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the south.

As the toll has mounted, fear and alarm have spread across the area with schools keeping students indoors, football games cancelled and residents thinking twice before making routine trips to shopping malls or petrol stations.

Police said they were not yet ready to give out information from witnesses on the licence plate of the vehicle, which could either be a light-coloured Chevrolet Astro van or a Ford Econoline van, believed to be the gunman's getaway vehicle.

Local media have variously reported that the van leaving the busy suburban shopping centre, about 11km west of Washington, after the latest killing had Maryland or Virginia plates.

Police said the van has a silver ladder rack on the top, a detail consistent with the description of the vehicle sought after Friday's killing of a father of six in Virginia. A broken left tail-light also matched.

They could not confirm local news reports that some witnesses had seen the killer get out of the van to fire and then get back in.

Police released composite pictures of two white vans similar to the ones being sought, but they have so far held back from releasing a composite of the killer.

The sniper, who uses a high-velocity rifle to pick off random victims and kill them with a hallmark single bullet, has so far eluded a massive hunt by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, with some help from the CIA.

An FBI spokesman declined to discuss any specific investigative steps being taken, but said any help from the military would be along the lines of checking or searching military records and databases for individuals with certain training, for example.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said the agency had 400 agents working on the case, including teams of new agents in training who were working a toll-free hot-line.

The CIA, at the request of law enforcement agencies, has been supplying bomb-sniffing dogs, a spokesman said. The dogs can sniff out ammunition and explosives in the sniper hunt.

As in Friday's attack, at a service station in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, authorities responded quickly on Monday, closing highways for hours as police converged on the shopping mall.

Helicopters shone high-intensity lights over woods and neighbourhoods in the area, which is a mixture of strip shopping centres, single family homes and apartment buildings.

But Manger said there were so many ways to leave the suburban centre that it was difficult for police to find the gunman.

Physical evidence has also been scant, with one clue left near where the boy was shot: A Tarot "Death" card with "Dear Policeman, I am God" scrawled on the back.

- REUTERS

Further reading:
The Washington sniper

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