Atlanta: US President Joe Biden deplored a surge in anti-Asian violence in the US after a deadly shooting rampage in Georgia, and asked all Americans to stand together against hate while visiting Atlanta. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met for more than an hour with leaders and state lawmakers from the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community, which has been rattled by this week’s murders of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, after a year of rising anti-Asian violence.
“They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed. They’ve been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, killed,” Biden lamented after meeting with Asian-American leaders in Atlanta. “It’s been a year of living in fear for their lives. Hate can have no safe harbour in America. It must stop. And it is on all of us, all of us together, to make it stop,” Biden said after the meeting, calling on US lawmakers to pass a Covid-19 hate crimes bill that would expand justice department review of hate crimes exacerbated by the pandemic. “Our silence is complicity. We cannot be complicit. We have to speak out. We have to act.”
Harris, the first Asian-American vice president in US history, tied the violence to the long history of racism in the US and likened it to the targeting of Muslims after the September 11, 2001, attacks. “Racism is real in America, and it has always been. Xenophobia is real in America, and always has been,” she said. “The president and I will not be silent. We will not stand by. We will always speak out against violence, hate crimes and discrimination wherever and whenever it occurs.”
6 Asian women among 8 shot dead
Meanwhile, eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, were shot dead in a string of attacks on Atlanta-area day spas last week, and a man suspected of carrying out all of the shootings was arrested hours later in southern Georgia, police said. Although authorities declined to offer a possible motive for the violence, the attacks prompted the New York Police Department's counter-terrorism unit to announce the deployment of additional patrols in Asian communities there as a precaution.
Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock in Cherokee County, was taken into custody for the crime. Police said that the same suspect was the gunman in all three shootings. A separate statement from the Atlanta Police Department said the suspect was connected to all the attacks by video evidence from the crime scenes. Investigators were still working "to confirm with certainty" that the shootings in Atlanta and Cherokee County were related.
