The Portuguese physicist who killed two Brown University students and a Portuguese professor at MIT gave no motive for the attacks and said he felt he had “nothing to apologise for”, according to US authorities.
The US Department of Justice revealed on Tuesday that Cláudio Neves Valente left a series of short videos after the shootings in the warehouse where he was found dead, after reportedly committing suicide, on December 18.
On December 13, Valente opened fire inside an engineering building at Brown University, killing two students and wounding nine others. Two days later, he shot dead Nuno Loureiro, a Portuguese professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), at the professor’s home in Brookline, near Boston. Loureiro had studied with Valente decades earlier in Portugal.
In the recordings, spoken mostly in Portuguese, Valente admitted he had been planning the attacks for at least six semesters but offered no explanation for why he carried them out.
In a transcript translated into English, provided by the Department of Justice, Neves Valente said he felt he had nothing to apologise for.
“I’m not going to apologise because, throughout my life, no one has ever sincerely apologised to me,” he said.
He also complained in the videos about injuring his eye during the shooting, and dismissed rumours spread online after the attack, including claims that he shouted Arabic phrases during the shooting, such as like ‘Allahu akbar’ God is great, in Arabic, an expression commonly used by terrorists when committing attacks in the name of Islam) upon entering the auditorium.
In one of the videos, the shooter said, “it must have been something like “Oh, no!” or something like that,” to express his disappointment that the auditorium seemed empty when he entered.
The students were hiding under their desks, but Neves Valente thought they had already escaped through an emergency exit.
“I never wanted to do this in an auditorium. I wanted to do it in a normal room. I had many opportunities. Especially this semester, I had many opportunities, but I always chickened out,” he added.
Valente insisted that he had no mental health issues and said that he did not want to be famous and that the video was not a manifesto.
In a disturbing assessment of his own actions, Valente described the shootings as “a little incompetent” but added: “At least something was done.” He said his main objective was to end events “on his own terms” and avoid being the one who suffered the most consequences.
The videos also reference a witness at Brown University whose confrontation with Valente ultimately led to his identification. The witness later posted on Reddit, urging police to investigate a grey Nissan linked to the suspect. Valente admitted he was surprised it took authorities so long to find him.
In the recording, he said he had owned the warehouse where his body was found for about three years.
The Portuguese man also said in his videos that he feels neither hatred nor love for the United States, the country he arrived in about 25 years ago to study physics in Brown University’s graduate programme, before leaving in the spring of 2001.
“It’s the same with Portugal and most of the places where I’ve been,” he also confessed, adding later: ‘I’ve been here for a long time without caring about anything.’
Brown University said in a statement on Tuesday that “the gravity of this tragedy continues to weigh heavily on the entire community” and that they continue to mourn the deaths of the two students and pray for the full recovery of those injured.
Cláudio Neves Valente has been described as a “brilliant” yet “failed” physicist who fell short of his own potential. Many theories have been floated as to the true motive of the killings, though the case continues to lead to more questions than answers as further details emerge.
