Washington police work on sniper profile

Police in Washington DC are working on a detailed profile of a suspected sniper believed to have gunned down six people in the city suburbs.

While they wait for the results of an FBI psychological profile, officers have completed a geographic profile that aims to narrow down where the killer might live.

“To us, the motivation of the offender is not relevant. We are looking at the geography,” said police researcher Kim Rossmo.

Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose would not give any specific details of what they had learned.

“Some of the more desirable smoking gun leads just aren’t there,” he said.

Geographic profiling is a relatively new investigative tool first used in Canada.

If a series of rapes, for example, occurs over a 10 sq mile area, geographic profiling can often narrow the area in which the attacker is likely to live to within half a square mile, Rossmo said.

Meanwhile, family and friends gathered yesterday to bury Prem Kumar Walekar, a taxi driver killed on Thursday outside a petrol station.

Family friend Lazarus Borge told the mourners Walekar “was indiscriminately shot dead by an elusive assailant, those evil hands entered his life like a snap, in an instant”.

Walekar was one of five people shot dead at random in Montgomery County in a 16 hour span last Wednesday and Thursday. A sixth victim was killed on Thursday in Washington DC.

Tests conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms confirmed that the same weapon was used to kill Walekar and three other victims.

Investigators have said ballistics evidence also linked the shooting of a 43-year-old woman in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, on Friday with the Maryland murders.

She was shot in the back in a car park at a craft store in Fredericksburg and was in a fair condition last night in hospital.

No arrests have been made. Officials appealed to residents to continue coming to police with any information that might be helpful, noting that about 4,000 calls so far have led to 800 leads.