5 People Shot At Site Of Black Lives Matter Protest In Minneapolis

Five peo­ple were injured last night as gun­men opened fire near the site of a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis.

According to a state­ment post­ed to the group’s Facebook page, the men, whom they call “white suprema­cists,” opened fire after they were asked to leave and were then escort­ed away from the encamp­ment. Mark Vancleave of the Minnesota Star Tribune tweet­ed this video of a pro­test­er recount­ing the event:

Minneapolis police said the five peo­ple suf­fered non-life-threat­en­ing injuries and the police are now search­ing for three white male sus­pects.

Minnesota Public Radio reports:

“Rumors about the nature of the shoot­ings — and the shoot­ers — spread quick­ly through the encamp­ment. Twitter feeds, using the hash­tags #Justice4Jamar and #FourthPrecinctShutdown that they’d been using all week, lit up the Internet with the­o­ries of the shoot­ers’ iden­ti­ties and police involvement.

” ‘I don’t want to per­pet­u­ate rumor,’ U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, who has joined the group through­out the week-plus demon­stra­tion, said after the shoot­ings. ‘I’d rather just try to get the facts out. That’s a bet­ter way to go. I know there’s a lot of spec­u­la­tion as to who these peo­ple were. And they well could have been, I’m not try­ing to say they weren’t white suprema­cists. But I just haven’t been able to piece togeth­er enough infor­ma­tion to say with any real clarity.’ ”

On Twitter, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis vowed to con­tin­ue its protests:

5 People Shot At Site Of Black Lives Matter Protest In Minneapolis