SALT LAKE CITY: Police and US federal agents said on Thursday they had found the bolt-action rifle they believed was used to kill the influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a university appearance in Utah, but were still hunting the shooter.
Kirk, a 31-year-old podcast-radio commentator and a close ally of US President Donald Trump, is credited with helping build the Republican Party's support among younger voters.
He was killed on Wednesday by a single gunshot in what Utah Governor Spencer Cox called a political assassination. The killing, captured in graphic detail in videos that rapidly spread around the internet, occurred as Kirk spoke onstage at an outdoor event called 'Prove Me Wrong' in front of about 3,000 people at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, about 65 km south of Salt Lake City.
The killer arrived on campus a few minutes before the event began, and could be seen on security-camera video ascending stairwells to get onto a nearby roof before firing a single shot, according to the FBI and state officials.
The shooter jumped off the roof and fled into an adjoining neighborhood, Robert Bohls, the FBI special agent in charge, told reporters. Investigators found a 'high-powered, bolt-action' rifle in a nearby wooded area, and were examining that along with palm prints and footprints for clues.
The shooter appears to be of college age and 'blended in well' on the campus, Utah Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason told reporters. Kirk, co-founder and president of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, was pronounced dead at a local hospital hours later. His killing stirred immediate expressions of outrage and denunciations of political violence from Democrats, Republicans and foreign governments.
Cox said Kirk's events on college campuses were part of a tradition of open political debate that was "foundational to the formation of our country, to our most basic constitutional rights".
"When someone takes the life of a person because of their ideas or their ideals, then that very constitutional foundation is threatened," Cox said.
Vice President JD Vance canceled his trip to New York to commemorate the attacks by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and instead will travel to Utah to visit Kirk's family, a person familiar with the situation said.
Kirk began his career in conservative politics as a teenager. A little more than a decade later, some of the friends he made along the way are now at the highest levels of US government and media, with Vance recalling that he was in multiple group chats with Kirk.
Meanwhile, rowdy scenes erupted on Thursday as the European Parliament refused a far-right request for a minute of silence to honour slain US activist and President Donald Trump ally Charlie Kirk.
Lawmakers on the European far right, which maintains close ties to Trump's White House, wanted the EU parliament, like the US Congress, to observe a silent tribute to the 31-year-old.
"Our right to freedom of speech cannot be extinguished," Charlie Weimers of the Sweden Democrats wrote to Speaker Roberta Metsola in requesting the gesture.
But when Weimers tried to observe the tribute by yielding his speaking time on the floor, he was cut short by the session chair, who reminded him the request had been denied for procedural reasons.
Lawmakers from his party erupted in protest by banging on their desks, while the rest of the hemicycle applauded the chair's intervention. — Reuters
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