US police investigating deadly mosque shooting as hate crime

,Police were investigating a shooting in the US state of California as a hate crime on Tuesday after a pair of teenage gunmen killed three people at a mosque complex.

Tearful women emerged from a center set up to reunite families caught up in the shooting, and yellow police tape blocked access to the Islamic Center of San Diego, where the victims were found on Monday.

Police said emergency response teams found the victims, all men, outside the sprawling complex, before later finding the shooters, aged 17 and 18, dead in a car from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds.”We are actively investigating this as a hate crime,” San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl told reporters. “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.”

The Islamic center describes itself on its website as the largest mosque in San Diego County, which is in southern California.

After a short period of lockdown when authorities advised area residents to stay inside, San Diego police announced that the threat at the center had been “neutralized.””We received a call of an active shooter at the Islamic center. Within four minutes, officers arrived on scene and observed immediately three deceased victims out in front,” Wahl said.

“We immediately began to deploy with an active shooter response into the mosque and adjacent school,” he said, adding that police had received calls about more gunfire nearby, where a landscaper had been shot at but not hit.

“The suspects at this point appear to have died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. There were no officers involved in firing their weapons,” Wahl said.