(Providence) Washington announced the immediate “suspension” of the issuance of visas by drawing lots, a popular program from which the man – of Portuguese nationality – suspected of having killed two students at the American Brown University and a professor at MIT had benefited.
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“Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the perpetrator of the Brown University shootings, entered the United States in 2017 through the Diversity Visa Program (DV1) by lottery and obtained a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed into our country,” the US Secretary of Homeland Security wrote on X on Thursday evening.
Kristi Noem ordered Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) “to suspend the DV1 program to prevent other Americans from becoming victims of this disastrous program.”
The visa lottery system was established in 1990 and allows U.S. residency cards to be issued to some 50,000 people each year, provided they meet required eligibility criteria, including a high school diploma or work experience.
An examination and interview are required before being issued a visa. Every year, tens of millions of people try their luck in this particular lottery.
Aged 48 and residing in Miami, the suspect in the Brown University shootings was found lifeless, police in Providence, Rhode Island, announced Thursday evening.
The Portuguese “killed himself,” said the city’s police chief, Oscar Perez, during a press conference. His body was found in a storage container in New Hampshire along with two guns. He appears to have acted alone.
The shooter first opened fire Saturday in Brown’s engineering and physics building. Two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, were killed and nine others injured.
PHOTO BING GUAN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, were killed.
He is also suspected of having killed Monday evening, some 70 kilometers away, a professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A professor since 2016 at MIT, Nuno Loureiro taught nuclear science and engineering. He was found with gunshot wounds Monday evening at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Aged 47, he was pronounced dead in hospital the next day.
Tracking
No motive has yet been put forward to explain these events, which occurred at two of the most prestigious universities in the country.
The suspect himself studied at Brown University in the early 2000s. Between 1995 and 2000, he followed the same physics studies as Nuno Loureiro at a university in Lisbon, reports the New York Times.
He came to the United States in 2000 on a student visa before obtaining a permanent resident green card in 2017.
According to Massachusetts prosecutor Leah Foley it is likely that Valente and Loureiro knew each other but she did not specify what the nature of their relationship might have been.
Before Claudio Neves Valente was identified and then found dead, the investigations seemed to be stalling.
PROVIDENCE POLICE PHOTO, PROVIDED BY REUTERS
The suspect, Claudio Neves Valente
The case was then relaunched thanks to a trail of financial data and video surveillance images collected at the two crime scenes.
A reward of $50,000 was also promised for any information leading to the arrest of the author, considered “armed and dangerous”.
The suspect was “sophisticated in the way he covered his tracks,” said federal prosecutor Leah Foley. He changed the license plates on his vehicle and used a phone that investigators struggled to locate.
