In an extraordinarily fast-paced investigation, authorities in the United States appear to have cracked the cases of the fatal shooting of brilliant Portuguese plasma scientist Nuno Loureiro in Massachusetts on Monday as well as the mass shootings at Brown University two days before.
Both attacks have been blamed on one man, apparently acting alone, who was also Portuguese.
Cláudio Neves Valente was found dead ‘from a self-inflicted gunshot wound’ in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, in the early hours of this morning.
Reports coming in overnight suggest police are not looking for anyone else in connection with either of the killings.
Neves Valente has been linked to Nuno Loureiro through the university that both attended in Portugal between 1995 and 2000 before moving on in their careers.
Both men studied physics, and Valente went on to attend Brown University in Rhode Island briefly in the early 2000s (withdrawing from classes in 2003), before moving permanently to the United States with a green card in 2017.
This sudden wrapping up of these two incidents in the United States comes after a story in the Jerusalem Post suggested that Israeli authorities were looking into intelligence received suggesting an Iranian connection to the murder of Nuno Loureiro.
That story has now seemingly been dropped as today’s press reports all talk of a motive for the killings that is still ‘unclear’.
It is possible that more on the background of Neves Valente will emerge over the course of the day. Certainly US media is full of CCTV images of the 48-year-old, some of which show him speaking on a mobile phone.
Sources: Rádio Renascença/ NBC News/ Correio da Manhã/ CBS News and others
