Suspect charged with eight murders in Atlanta shootings

ATLANTA: A 21-year-old gunman with a "sex addiction" was charged Wednesday with murdering eight people in spas around the US city of Atlanta, in triple attacks that have deeply shaken the Asian-American community.

Police said suspect Robert Aaron Long has denied a racist motive to Tuesday's attacks -- in which six of the victims were women of Asian origin -- but that they had yet to determine the shooter's reason for opening fire.

"The suspect did take responsibility for the shootings," Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office told a news conference.

Long, who is white, "does claim it was not racially motivated," Baker added, but stressed that "this is still early" in the investigation.

The suspect "apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction," Baker said.

Long told police he had frequented massage parlors in the past and launched the attacks as a form of vengeance -- against "a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate."

With the probe ongoing into the gunman's motive, the attacks thrust the spotlight onto a spike in violence targeting Asian-Americans -- fueled during the Covid-19 pandemic, activists believe, by talk of the "Chinese virus" by former president Donald Trump and others.

"We have lost so many lives this past year. We have seen racism and discrimination and a surge of violence against Asian-Americans who are scapegoated because of the pandemic," Sam Park, a local representative of the Asian-American community, told AFP in Atlanta.

"It shocks the conscience," he said of the attacks, which drew reactions of outrage and solidarity from across the nation.

President Joe Biden, who spoke out last week against the spike in anti-Asian violence, once again called it "very troublesome" -- while stressing that motivation in the Atlanta shootings had yet to be determined.

"I know that Asian-Americans are very concerned," said Biden.