Police probe motives behind murder of US Muslims

North Carolina police were looking into a triple homicide on Thursday after three Muslim-Americans were gunned down in their home on Tuesday.

Newlyweds Shaddy Barakat and Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, both in their early 20s - along with Abu-Salha's sister Razan, 19 - were shot multiple times in the university town of Chapel Hill by 46-year-old Craig Stephen Hicks, who called himself a "gun-toting atheist."

Local authorities initially said the murders were linked to disputes over parking and noise. Police asked the FBI for help in their probe, and Ripley Rand, the US attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, said his office was monitoring the investigation.

"We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated, and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case," Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue wrote in an email.

Rand, however, said it "appears at this point to have been an isolated incident."

Microblogging platform Twitter was abuzz with comments and condolences under the hashtags #MuslimLivesMatter, #ChapelHillShooting and #CallItTerrorism.

"It's striking that a sort of moderate, cautionary approach is employed when it is a non-Muslim Caucasian killing three young people," H.A. Hellyer, a Cairo-based analyst, told AFP news agency. "That's the right approach - but it ought to be like that all the time," added Hellyer, who works with the Brookings Institution's Project on US Relations with the Islamic World.

Many people also voiced outrage that US media had taken so long to report the killings.

The woman's father, Mohammad Abu-Salha, said he was convinced this was a hate crime. "The media here bombards the American citizen with Islamic, Islamic, Islamic terrorism and makes people here scared of us and hate us and want us out. So if somebody has any conflict with you, and they already hate you, you get a bullet in the head," Abu-Salha, who is a psychiatrist, told the Associated Press.

He said one of his daughters had told him that Hicks "hates us for what we are and how we look."

Hicks was charged with first-degree murder and was in custody after a brief court hearing on Wednesday. He is said to have been angry often and to have frequently confronted his neighbors, sometimes wearing a gun on his hip. His ex-wife said he was obsessed with the shooting-rampage movie "Falling Down," and showed "no compassion at all" for other people. His current wife, Karen Hicks, maintained that the killings were not a hate crime and that Hicks "champions the rights of others." She later said she was divorcing him.

Candlelight vigil

On Wednesday evening, about 2,000 people attended a candlelight vigil for the victims at the North Carolina State University campus. Barakat was pursuing an advanced degree in dentistry at the university. His wife had studied human biology at North Carolina State and was planning to start dentistry school in the fall. The two were married on December 27 and both had been charity workers, donating time and raising money to help the poor and Syrian refugees. Abu-Salha's sister had been majoring in architecture and environmental design at North Carolina State and had donated her time to help Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Thousands are expected to attend the funeral.

sb/mkg (Reuters, AP, AFP, dpa)