Investigations continue into whether a deadly shooting at a New Jersey Jewish market was an anti-Semitic attack after US authorities recounted how a man and woman deliberately pulled up to the place in a stolen rental van with at least one rifle and got out firing.
A day after the gunbattle and stand-off in Jersey City that left six people dead - the two killers, a police officer and three people who had been inside the store - law enforcement officials warn they have not established the motive for the attack.
"The why and the ideology and the motivation - that's what we're investigating," New Jersey Attorney-General Gurbir Grewal said on Wednesday, adding authorities were also trying to determine if anyone else was involved.
But Mayor Steve Fulop said surveillance video of the attackers made it clear they targeted the kosher market and he pronounced the bloodshed a hate crime against Jews, as did New York's mayor and governor.
Also, investigators believe the two dead attackers, who were thought to be a couple, identified themselves in the past as Black Hebrew Israelites, a movement whose members have been known to rail against whites and Jews, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter.
Authorities have also found social media postings from at least one of the killers that were anti-police and anti-Jewish, the official said.
The FBI on Wednesday searched the Harlem headquarters of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which is the formal name of the Black Hebrew group.
The killers were identified as David N Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50 - both of them also prime suspects in the slaying of a livery driver found dead in a car boot in nearby Bayonne at the weekend.
Two of the victims at the store were identified by members of the Orthodox Jewish community as Mindel Ferencz, 31, who with her husband owned the grocery, and Moshe Deutsch, 24, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn.
The third victim was store owner Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49.
The bloodshed across the river from New York City began at a cemetery, where Detective Joseph Seals was gunned down by the assailants, who then drove more than a kilometre to the kosher market.
Grewal said that within seconds of pulling up to the market, Anderson got out with a rifle and began shooting, and Graham followed him into the store. He would not say whether Graham had a weapon.
A pipe bomb was found in the van, FBI agent Gregory Ehrie said.
"The report from the Jersey City mayor saying it was a targeted attack makes us incredibly concerned in the Jewish community," said Evan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights organisation.
"They want answers. They demand answers. If this was truly a targeted killing of Jews then we need to know that right away, and there needs to be the pushing back on this at the highest levels possible."
Australian Associated Press
