Police probe sniper links to shooting

A shooting at a restaurant in Virginia, USA, in which a 37-year-old man was injured, has attracted a swarm of law enforcement officers, including a task force investigating the string of sniper shootings in the Washington DC area.

Maryland State Police Sergeant William Vogt said troopers were on the lookout for a white van with a ladder rack.

State police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said portions of Interstate 95 were immediately shut down as police set up road blocks. She said it was too early to tell if the shooting was related to the sniper shootings.

Montgomery County police Captain Nancy Demme said the sniper task force was on its way.

Mr Geller said the victim was taken to a hospital in Richmond where he is undergoing surgery.

Raymond Loving, who owns a Texaco petrol station around 50 yards from the Ponderosa steakhouse in Ashland where the victim was shot last night, told CNN a woman came into his petrol station and said someone had been shot in the parking lot.

“She didn’t see anything. She just heard a loud boom,” Mr Loving said.

In Maryland, authorities were testing a shell casing found in a white rental van for links to the sniper attacks. Earlier yesterday, police refused to discuss any details about the van or the shell.

Police said it would be at least tomorrow before they could announce whether the shell casing found in the van – a vehicle similar to one police have profiled in the ambush killings – is connected to the shooting spree that has claimed nine lives since October 2.

After a string of 11 shootings – nine of them fatal – in Washington and its suburbs in the states of Virginia and Maryland, the sniper had gone more than four days without a shooting as of yesterday.

On Friday, Matthew Dowdy, 37, of Falls Church, Virginia, was charged with making a false statement concerning Monday’s killing of FBI analyst Linda Franklin at a shopping centre. Authorities said Mr Dowdy falsely described an olive-skinned man and a cream-coloured van with a burned-out taillight at the scene of one killing.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail. Mr Dowdy was ordered held without bail pending a hearing tomorrow.