RITU JHA
The Sikh Coalition, the nation’s largest civil organization for the Sikh-American community, has urged the Indianapolis police and the FBI to investigate if the April 15 massacre at a FedEx warehouse that left nine people dead including the shooter was a white supremacist hate crime.
Four of the eight people Brandon Scott Hole, an ex employee at the FedEx facility, were Sikhs. Two of the five people injured are also Sikhs.
Hole, as an ex employee, knew that 90 percent of the workers at the facility are Sikhs, points out the letter the Sikh Coalition has written to the Indianapolis police and the FBI.
“During the gunfire Mr Hole specifically aimed at the Sikh employees and made a concerted effort to avoid non-Sikhs at various points,” said the letter e-mailed on April 20 by Sikh Coalition legal director Amrith Kaur Akre to Indianapolis police chief Randal Taylor and FBI special agent Paul Keenan.
“He [Hole] told a white woman running towards him to get out of the way, just after having shot a Sikh man in the face,” the letter said.
The same day the letter was sent, CNN reported that Hole browsed white supremacist websites on his home computer.
Rajanpreet Kaur, spokesperson for the Sikh Coalition, told indica News: “We are underscoring the need for a full and transparent investigation that includes the possibility of bias as a motivation, given the critical piece of new and relevant information regarding his past viewing of white supremacist websites.”
The Sikh Coalition, she said, “strongly urges both the IMPD [Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department] and the FBI to fully investigate Mr Hole’s attack on the Indianapolis FedEx facility, including all bias motivating factors that may be at play.”
Amrith Kaur Akre, Sikh Coalition’s legal director, said through a press statement: “The reality is, even if Mr. Hole was a disgruntled employee due to the fact that Sikh employees were getting more hours than him or for any other reason, it is essential to connect the dots of all of his activities leading up to this tragic attack to fully understand the role racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy may have played in his alleged anger toward his former employer.”
