The man suspected of carrying out shootings at Brown University last weekend has been found dead in a storage facility in the US state of New Hampshire.
Investigators have identified him as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who attended the university in Providence, Rhode Island, more than two decades ago and was granted permanent US residence in 2017.
He was also accused of killing Nuno Loureiro, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at his home in Boston on Monday.
Mr Valente had been a former physics PhD student who was familiar with the building at Brown University where the attack took place on Saturday, US Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said. Two people were killed and nine were injured in the attack.
Law enforcement officials found Mr Valente's body at a storage facility in the city of Salem, about 30km north of Boston, on Thursday night after acting on a tip-off.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha told reporters at a press conference that Mr Valente took his own life and investigators believe he acted alone.
Providence police chief Oscar Perez said a tip from a person who confronted Mr Valente inside a bathroom on Brown's campus led police to a car he had rented from an agency in Massachusetts. There, police were able to obtain footage of Mr Valente in which he was seen wearing the same clothing seen in footage from the Brown University shooting, and find his name on the rental agreement.
Mr Neronha said Mr Valente had rented the storage unit where his body was found. Investigators do not know why he carried out the shooting, or why he chose to do so in the building he targeted.
“I don't think we have any idea why now, or why, Brown, or why these students, why this classroom,” he said. “That is really unknown to us.”
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Mr Valente was enrolled there as a graduate student studying physics from the autumn of 2000 to the spring of 2001. “He has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.
Ms Foley said Mr Neves came to Brown University on a student visa and eventually obtained legal permanent residence status, known as a green card, in September 2017. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
Ms Foley said Mr Valente and Mr Loureiro previously attended the same academic programme at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000.
According to his MIT faculty page, Mr Loureiro graduated from the physics programme at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000. The same year, Mr Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000, Associated Press reported.
After officials identified Mr Valente as the suspect, US President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery programme that allowed him to stay in the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on X that she was asking US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the lottery, officially known as the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme.
Ms Noem said the pause would “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme”.
Suspending the programme, which awards up to 50,000 permanent residence visas annually, is the latest step by Mr Trump to limit immigration, often in response to violence his administration blames on lax immigration policies.
