Former Ku Klux Klan leader accused of killing three Jews

The man accused of killing three people in attacks at a Jewish community centre and Jewish retirement complex near Kansas City is a known white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader who was once the subject of a nationwide manhunt.

Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, was booked into Johnson County jail on a preliminary charge of first-degree murder after the attacks in Overland Park on Sunday.

Overland Park police chief John Douglass declined to publicly identify the man suspected in the attacks. But an official at a suburban Kansas City jail, speaking on the condition of anonymity, identified the suspect as Cross.

Douglass said the suspect made several statements to police, “but it’s too early to tell you what he may or may not have said” during the attacks. He also said it was too early in the investigation to determine whether he had an anti-Semitic motive. The Jewish festival of Passover began yesterday.

SITE, a US-based terror monitoring group, described the suspect as a known and vocal anti- Semite who frequently calls for genocide against Jews.

Police said the attacks happened within minutes of one another. At around 1pm a gunman shot two people in the car park behind the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Kansas City. He then drove a few blocks to a retirement community, Village Shalom, and gunned down a woman there, Douglass said.

Officers arrested him in an elementary school car park a short time later. Police said the gunman never entered any buildings. Douglass said the gunman also shot at but missed two other people.

Cross lives in a small single-story home, bordered on three sides with barbed wire fences just outside the small southwest Missouri town of Aurora, some 180 miles south of Overland Park.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre said the suspect has been involved in the white supremacist movement for most of his life. He founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and was its “grand dragon” in the 1980s. The Army veteran and retired truck driver later founded another white supremacist group, the White Patriot Party, the centre said.

He was the subject of a nationwide manhunt in 1987 for violating the terms of his bail while appealing a North Carolina conviction for operating a paramilitary camp. The search ended after federal agents found him and three other men in a mobile home in Ozark, Missouri, which was filled with hand grenades, automatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition. He ran for US House in 2006 and the US Senate in 2010, espousing a white power platform.