Sniper investigators hope for breakthrough

An FBI terrorism analyst has been identified as the ninth person killed by the Washington-area sniper, shot in the head in an attack investigators say has yielded the most detailed clues yet.

For the first time, witnesses were able to give information about licence plates on vehicles seen fleeing the scene on Monday, including a light-coloured Chevrolet Astro van with a burned-out rear taillight.

A law enforcement official said yesterday that another witness gave a description of a dark-skinned man, possibly Hispanic or Middle Eastern, in a white van.

“There was some additional information that we were able to get from last night’s case, and I am confident that that information is going to lead us to an arrest in the case,” Fairfax County Police Chief Tom Manger said.

Law enforcement officials said there was no indication the sniper targeted Linda Franklin because of her job. She worked for the FBI’s cybercrimes division, which handles computer crimes and intellectual property cases.

Mrs Franklin, a 47-year-old mother of two, was killed on Monday night as she and her husband loaded packages into their car outside a store at a sprawling shopping centre.

Ballistics evidence connected the killing to the gunman who has killed eight other people and wounded two more in Washington and its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland in the shooting spree that began on October 2.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday agreed to the FBI’s request to use military surveillance aircraft in the hunt for the killer.

Federal agents on the plane will relay any information they collect to authorities on the ground.

The Army has also started searching its records for people with sniper training.

Separately, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said investigators are hesitant to rule out the possibility that the killings are the work of a terrorist because there is no hard evidence about motive.

The shooting spree has renewed calls for tougher gun control. The House of Representatives yesterday passed without dissent a bill authorising federal funds to help states computerise criminal records so they can be used in background checks on gun buyers.

But President George W Bush does not support the recent days’ push for firearms “fingerprinting”, his spokesman Ari Fleischer said, because Mr Bush is unconvinced of the technology’s accuracy and is concerned about gun owners’ privacy.

White House officials later called a meeting with officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and asked them to study technological and feasibility issues that would be involved in a national fingerprinting system.

Police yesterday interviewed Robert Young, a construction worker who said he had heard a muffled gunshot and saw a white van the night before at the shopping centre.

Mr Young said as he backed his truck out of his parking spot, a white Astro van with two men inside tried to turn into his lane. He said the driver appeared very agitated to find his way blocked and instead drove by a neighbouring restaurant and out of sight.

Mr Young described the driver as a short man of slight build who appeared to be Middle Eastern. He said: “I got a good look at the guy.”

The driver “seemed to be excessively irritated because he couldn’t pull into my lane”, he said. “I thought this fool was going to want to get out of the van and duke or something. But he didn’t. He kept on going.”

All the victims have been cut down by a single bullet fired from a distance with a high-powered rifle as the victims went about their everyday tasks. The sniper’s only apparent communication with investigators has been a tarot death card inscribed, “Dear Policeman, I am God.”