Reuters, New York :
A gunman shot dead two New York City police officers and then killed himself, police said, after a social media post indicated he may having been seeking revenge for the death of an unarmed black man during an arrest attempt.
The two New York City Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, were ambushed in their patrol car Saturday afternoon, said NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton.
“They were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniforms,” he told a news conference after the attack, the first in which NYPD officers had been killed by gunfire since 2011.
The two men were attacked outside a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn at a tense time for the NYPD, the largest police force in the country.
Protests over policing tactics have roiled the city since a grand jury declined this month to indict a white NYPD officer in the killing of Eric Garner, a black man who died after being placed in a chokehold during a July arrest on Staten Island.
The shooter fired through the passenger-side window of their marked patrol car, striking both officers in the head before they had a chance to respond, Bratton said. The suspect fled on foot, followed by other police, then took his own life on a subway platform. President Barack Obama condemned the killings, saying “two brave men won’t be going home to their loved ones tonight.” Attorney General Eric Holder promised the support of the Justice Department throughout the investigation. Bratton said the gunman, identified as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, had made “anti-police” comments online. Shortly before the double shooting, a message on an Instagram account apparently belonging to Brinsley said “They Take 1 Of Ours … Let’s Take 2 of Theirs.”
The incident followed deaths of Garner and Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot and killed by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August.
