2 Captured in Shootings; Gun Linked to 11 Attacks

The killing rampage that menaced suburban Washington with random death for three weeks was declared at an end Thursday by relieved officials who arrested a 41-year-old drifter, who was once an Army sharpshooter, and a 17-year-old Jamaican youth.

Federal authorities said Thursday evening they believe the two suspects acted in tandem as a mobile sniper team that roamed the Washington region’s highways, killing 10 and wounding three in gas stations, parking lots, on streets and at a middle school. Ballistic tests on a rifle seized from their car at a rural Maryland rest stop match the weapon used in 11 of the shootings, authorities said.

John Allen Muhammad was arraigned Thursday on unrelated federal weapons charges in Baltimore and held at a maximum-security federal detention center. His juvenile companion, Lee Boyd Malvo, was being held as a material witness in the sniper cases.

Federal agents and detectives from Montgomery County, Md., where six people were slain, questioned the pair and examined bags of evidence hauled from the car. Maryland, Virginia, District of Columbia and federal prosecutors planned to meet today to discuss whether to file murder charges and other counts against them.

“We now consider them suspects in the string of shootings that occurred in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia,” said Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose, who in three weeks went from nonentity to national television fixture.

The denouement was stunning in its banality. Cowed for 22 days by an unseen carrier of death, the Washington region awoke to learn of suspects so poor they slept in a disheveled car. The killer taunted police, warning, “I am God,” but those delusions faded. In the bleak Maryland sunrise, police quickly amassed a trove of evidence and captured their suspects without incident.

“Tonight, the people in the region are breathing a collective sigh of relief,” said Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan, who had attended a wearying succession of funerals.

For long, harrowing days and nights, the killer eluded a law-enforcement juggernaut of nearly 2,000 police and government agents.

Baltimore police officials said Thursday that officers had questioned Muhammad there the day after a 13-year-old boy was wounded outside his middle school in Bowie. But the region’s obsession with white vans and white box trucks led officers to set him loose in his blue Chevrolet Caprice.

But the sniper also made mistakes. Last weekend, frustrated by his failure to reach police, a man who said he was the killer called a Roman Catholic priest in Ashland, Va. “He just called this parish, got a priest and said, ‘I’m the Washington sniper and there’s this other murder-robbery in Montgomery, Ala.,’ ” an official said.

The next night, the sniper wounded a man near an Ashland restaurant. But the remark led task force investigators to make the critical leap to a Sept. 21 slaying in Montgomery that gave them the name of the younger suspect.

Tipped by a trucker who heard a police alert for the pair and their blue Caprice, teams of federal agents and Maryland state troopers surprised the suspects before dawn Thursday in their parked car at a highway rest area near Myersville, north of Frederick.

“The task force made a dynamic entry on the car and there was no resistance,” said Joseph G. Green, a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent at the scene.

Late in the day, Muhammad appeared in handcuffs and blue paper slippers before U.S. Magistrate Beth P. Gesner, responding in a weak voice as the judge asked him whether he understood the proceedings. His hair matted, Muhammad hesitated when Gesner asked whether he had taken liquor or medication over the previous day, then said faintly: “Yes, ma’am.” He was not released. Malvo’s hearing as a material witness was closed because of his juvenile status.

Authorities said they seized a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle capable of firing the same hollow-point .223-caliber rounds that killed 10 people and wounded three over a 100-mile geographical stretch from Maryland’s strip-mall suburbs to a rural Virginia highway transit town.

Sniper task force officials said they found a ventilation hole punched through the rear of the Caprice’s trunk -- large enough to allow a rifle to be aimed and fired without exposing the gunman. Officials also said the car’s rear seat folded down, creating a makeshift sniper’s nest in the trunk. A rifle scope and tripod capable of aiding the sniper’s aim and bracing the gun were also recovered.

The seized weapon and other items provide strong evidence, authorities said, that the car’s trunk had been converted into a mobile bunker to fire the solitary, long-range shots that felled the sniper’s victims. At least three victims were shot from dense woods.

“With that kind of hide-out, no one would see gunfire or the shooter,” one federal official said. “It was pretty effective.”

The Caprice was purchased from Sure Shot Autos in Trenton, N.J., by Muhammad and a second man. FBI agents and police in Camden, N.J., said Thursday they are searching for Nathanel Osbourne, a Jamaican national who helped Muhammad buy the car. Police want to question Osbourne to see whether he has any knowledge of the crimes and are interested in his role in buying the car -- once used as a police cruiser in Bordentown Township, N.J.

“We want to look at the nature of the relationship and what was going on,” Camden Police Capt. Joe Richardson said. “Naturally, if he was involved, the FBI would bring appropriate charges.”

Another federal law enforcement official said detectives were examining the possibility that the sniper team traded off firing the 14 shots -- the first hitting only a store window. Muhammad, a Persian Gulf War veteran who qualified as a sharpshooter during Army training in Louisiana, would have had the skill to make the more difficult salvos that aimed for the head. Four victims died in that manner.

“One guy shot for the head, one guy didn’t,” the official said. “There were different styles. One killed, the other might not have been good enough.”

Despite that theory, authorities said little about what they knew about Malvo’s alleged role. But the youth’s closed-door hearing in federal court Thursday was a clear sign that he was more than a fellow traveler.

“It sounds like the kid was more involved than just driving,” a Justice Department official said. “All the facts have not come out yet.”

Investigators were still working Thursday night to establish a motive for the wanton killings. One hint, they said, came in the fitful, still-undisclosed communications over the last week between the killers and FBI and ATF negotiation teams.

A federal official said the two letters left by the killers near shooting scenes in Ashland last week and Aspen Hill, Md., on Tuesday morning contained passages indicating a vague domestic terrorism slant.

While agents have yet to find any evidence of links to domestic or foreign terrorist groups, they continue to search -- and make reference to reports from Muhammad’s acquaintances in Tacoma, Wash., where he once lived, that he espoused “anti-American” views and expressed some approval for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“Witnesses say he was angry and had a gripe against the U.S.,” one Justice Department official said. “Apparently he also sympathized with the hijackers. He sided with them over us. He made statements that were anti-American.”

Some investigators are considering the possibility that the killers purposely stalked civilians and killed a smattering of ages, genders and races to show that the government was impotent to protect its citizenry.

“There were passages in [the sniper’s] conversations [with task force officials] that expressed arrogance toward law enforcement, particularly the FBI, in terms of their ability to deal with someone like this,” the official said. “They saw themselves as supermen.”

But money seemed to be at least a partial motive. Though a ransom demand did not surface immediately, the sniper pressed for $10 million in one letter to police.

Authorities were continuing to interview witnesses to determine whether Muhammad had ever made overt threats of violence. Already, as agents fanned out across the country to interview relatives and friends, they learned that Muhammad’s submerged rage often leached out in violent action.

Muhammad terrorized one ex-wife for years, according to court documents and child custody papers. He threatened her with violence and death, and he abducted their three children for long periods of time without permission, according to court records.

In those records, Muhammad’s wife, Mildred Denice Williams, said her husband’s long stint in the Army made him a weapon and demolition expert. In May 2000, his accusations prompted her to seek admission to a hospital.

Williams -- who now lives in Prince George’s County, Md., where one of the shootings occurred -- obtained several restraining orders against her husband, first in Washington state and then in Maryland and in Washington, D.C. She said her husband was “very irrational” and regularly threatened to “destroy” her.

She said Muhammad stalked her at home and at work, tapped her phone and became so irate that he began “threatening to destroy my life.”

“I’m afraid of John,” she said. “He was a demolition expert in the military.”

According to court papers filed Wednesday in Seattle that were used as the basis for the firearms charge against him, Muhammad has used the names John Williams, Wayne Weeks and Wayne Weekley, and trained with several rifles and firearms.

The documents said he owned a Bushmaster semiautomatic .223-caliber rifle, model A-35, which had been shipped across state lines in violation of U.S. law.

Report of 3 Visits

On Tuesday, according to the documents, FBI agents interviewed a man named Robert Edward Holmes, who said he had known Muhammad since late 1985, when they were stationed at Ft. Lewis, near Tacoma.

The affidavit said Muhammad had visited Holmes’ residence three times over the last six months and that during the first visit, Muhammad and someone else who was not identified displayed an AR-15 assault rifle and another weapon identified as either a .303-caliber rifle or a .30-06.

On the second visit, according to the affidavit, Holmes saw Muhammad with an AR-15 with a scope that he carried in an aluminum briefcase. It said that Muhammad and the unidentified person with him talked about taking the AR-15 to a range to “zero it” -- aligning the scope to improve its accuracy.

According to the affidavit, Muhammad told Holmes: “Can you imagine the damage you could do if you could shoot with a silencer?”

Authorities with the sniper task force knew none of that information, and did not even know about Muhammad or Malvo until last Friday.

If there was a prelude to their involvement, it may have come first in Camden on Sept. 11, when Muhammad bought a used car. It was a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, an old police cruiser capable of taking heavy punishment.

The car was registered with the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles at an address that was used by Osbourne, the fugitive sought by the FBI, an official said.

It is not known whether Muhammad lived at Osbourne’s home, but he did receive mail there. Witnesses have told the FBI that Muhammad was seen in the Camden neighborhood throughout the fall of this year, possibly putting him in New Jersey after the shootings in Montgomery, Ala., that police are still trying to link to Muhammad. Witnesses said Muhammad frequented a local bar and may have worked there, the FBI said.

Not much is known about Osbourne, except that he “may have immigration problems,” an FBI official said. When police caught up with Osbourne’s brother Thursday, they found that he did not have valid immigration status, he said.

Officials could not be sure whether Malvo was with Muhammad at the time, but 10 days later, Malvo’s own trail began, officials said.

Police in Montgomery said Thursday they believe Malvo was involved in a Sept. 21 liquor store shooting that killed one employee and injured another.

“We still have a case to prove. I’m very optimistic,” Police Chief John Wilson told reporters. “I think we’ve got a lot to work with here.”

Federal investigators assigned to the sniper case became interested in the liquor store shooting last weekend after receiving a call from a person claiming to be involved in the sniper shootings. In an apparent attempt to gain credibility, the caller mentioned aspects of the liquor store assault, including where it took place.

The Washington attacks started with a burst of gunfire into the window of a Michaels craft store in Aspen Hill, Md., on Oct. 2, with the first fatal shooting less than an hour later. The killer dispatched victims with ease, anonymous as the wind, killing, then retreating into the ether. First in Montgomery County, where four victims were gunned down in one day along the Connecticut Avenue commercial strip. Then, as police increased patrols and citizens began living life indoors, the sniper became more selective, gunning down victims wherever police presence was minimal and highway access was easy.

People were killed in isolated gas stations at night and less than 50 yards from a state trooper in daylight. Woman and men, blacks and whites, were killed indiscriminately.

But he was not untouchable. On Oct. 8, the day after the anonymous rifleman gunned down a 13-year-old student outside Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Prince George’s County, police in Baltimore had made contact with one of those arrested.

While authorities were seeking a white van, based on repeated witness reports from some shooting locations, police approached a blue Caprice in a gas station parking lot at the intersection of 28th and Sisson, in west Baltimore.

The sleeping man inside presented a driver’s license and registration in the name of John Allen Muhammad, according to police spokeswoman Ragina Avarella. Malvo was not in the car, she said.

Muhammad’s name was entered into a database of police contacts with citizens that the city has been keeping for the last two years, Avarella said. But “everything seemed in order and valid,” she said.

“That happens a lot,” another law enforcement source said. “The names are in files somewhere, but you don’t know it.”

Muhammad first showed up at the 28th Street Mobil, just off the Jones Falls Expressway, after 11 p.m. the night before. The door was locked and he approached the night window, asking where he could get a hot meal, according to a cashier at the gas station. The night clerk suggested a nearby 7-Eleven.

Then he returned and bought a bag of chips. Later the clerk noticed the Caprice was parked in a lot up on a hill. By 3 a.m., “they were just about to call the police when the police came on their own,” the cashier said.

After that incident, the killer struck four more times. But last Friday, when the priest receives his unexpected call, the death spree begin to unravel.

By Saturday, task force detectives were in Alabama, culling old murder cases.

When agents came across the Montgomery case, they were given a fingerprint lifted from the pages of a gun magazine at the crime scene. It matched another print stored on an Immigration and Naturalization Service computer -- Malvo’s, which had been taken for a deportation hearing in December.

Sunday is when they got the name. “And then it moved just like lightning,” a federal law enforcement official said.

For the next several days, police and killers communicated fitfully. Moose read veiled messages that hinted of a demand for $10 million and drop-off points.

He laced his pleas with lyrics from the lilting reggae tunes of the Five Stars, a Jamaican group.

Behind the scenes, the noose tightened.

Then, in a dizzying day, it ended quietly. The suspects woke up to police guns.

On Thursday night, Moose, looking more relaxed than the public has ever seen him, looked into the cameras, unbent and squinting.

“We have not given in to the terror,” he said. “Yes, we have all experienced anxiety, but in the end, resiliency has won out.”