Sure as shooting

We May Never Know Why # 1 for 2010…

I hadn’t got a clue why this happened.

Gunman's body found after Finland shootings

Finnish police have confirmed they have found the body of a gunman responsible for killing five people in a shooting rampage in the southern city of Espoo.

Investigators said 43-year-old Ibrahim Shkupolli shot dead three men and a woman with a 9mm pistol at a grocery shop inside the Sello shopping centre.

The body of Shkupolli's ex-girlfriend, who also worked at the shop, was later found at a flat in the city.

Oh, that’s why. It’s a domestic.

The incident is Finland's third major shooting in the past two years.

Police were first notified about the shooting inside the Prisma grocery store at 1008 local time (0808 GMT) on Thursday.

A witness told Finland's state broadcaster, YLE, that the gunman was dressed in black and appeared to have opened fire at random, hitting one man in the head and a woman in the stomach.

The victims were Prisma employees aged 27, 40, 42 and 45. Two were shot on the shop's first floor, the other two on its second floor, police said.

Another witness said chaos had ensued after the first shots were heard.

"There were loads of people who were crying, and many salespeople who were completely panicked," the witness told Finnish radio.

The gunman was later seen walking towards another shop. He then disappeared, sparking a major manhunt. The shopping centre was evacuated and cordoned off by armed police, and trains were not allowed to stop at the nearby Leppavaara railway station.

'Domestic' motive

It’s a domestic.

At a later news conference, police announced a Prisma employee had also been found dead at her flat in the outskirts of the city. It later emerged that the victim was Shkupolli's ex-girlfriend.

Investigators said they believed her killing had a "domestic"

It’s a domestic.

motive, and that there had been a restraining order in place.

"The four victims in the shopping centre were, in a way, outsiders. It looks like the incident is linked to the fifth victim," Chief Inspector Jukka Kaski told a news conference.

It’s a domestic.

"She seems to have been the gunman's main target and the whole shooting is tied up with the relationship between her and the gunman," he added.

It’s a domestic.

Shkupolli then returned to his own home and turned the gun on himself, police said.

Shkupolli was an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo who moved to Finland in 1990, shortly after which he began a relationship with the woman found dead on Thursday, according to Finnish media reports.

Their relationship broke down for the final time last year, when she told police he had threatened to kill her. A restraining order against him was later granted by a local court.

Shkupolli, who worked for a warehousing company organising deliveries to the Prisma shop, was reportedly also married to a woman of Albanian descent, with whom he had a family.

How do they know so fast?

Mind you, communications in Finland are famously easy and efficient (it must be all those Nokias), whereas in the States information is much more restricted and scarce: ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post and the New York Times all found it very difficult to access much background on Major Hasan, as it had all been taken out of the Library of Congress by Fox, Mark Steyn, the National review, FrontPage Magazine, Ann Coulter, and others – none of whom had taken the book back yet, the scoundrels.

Well, it does appear to have been a domestic murder that somehow the late Ibrahim Shkupolli decided to share with the general public. But I’m sure we’re all satisfied that there was nothing, um, ideological about it all.

The BBC is very keen to demonstrate its utter certainly that this is just love gone bad (with a free shopping mall massacre thrown in for local colour) and nothing else.

It’s that instant reflex that tells the keen observer that the BBC has a line on random shootings by Muslims: that they have nothing at all to do with Islam.

Ever.

Because even when they might just conceivably have something to do with the Religion of Peace here:

The BBC's North America correspondent Matthew Price says Maj Hasan's Islamic background has provoked a discussion in the US about whether the attack is a one-off tragedy or if it is illustrative of a more serious threat.

Or here.

It is not clear what motivated the attacker, named as 39-year-old military psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan.

But some reports said the US-born Muslim was unhappy about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Or here.

Shooting raises fears for Muslims in US army

An army major accused of firing on and killing fellow soldiers in Texas is a US-born Muslim.

The reasons for the shooting are not clear, but Major Nidal Malik Hasan was reported to be unhappy at the alleged abuse he had received.

The BBC's Penny Spiller considers how it may affect the thousands of Muslims in the US military.

He is also reported to be a devout Muslim, who attended daily prayers at a mosque and was seen on the morning of the shooting wearing traditional Arabic dress as he shopped for groceries.

His relatives said he had become disillusioned with US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and strongly opposed his own imminent deployment to Afghanistan.

He had also long wanted to leave the army after suffering harassment because of his religion, they said.

Whatever the motivation, the tragedy at Fort Hood army base highlights the sensitivities surrounding the issue of American Muslims serving in the US armed forces.

…the evidence is questionable, to say the least.

So, (to paraphrase a friend), for those who are keeping score, whereas it takes days and indeed weeks for the BBC to still be puzzled whether Islam motivated a particular mass murder by a self-proclaimed Soldier of Allah and known Islamist, they are immediately and absolutely slap bang certain that they know the late Ibrahim S was purely and solely involved in a unilateral suicide pact which derived 100% from an affair of the heart.

I’m looking forward to the explanations - if the BBC and their pals bother to follow it up - as to why this typical everyday Romeo and Juliet story involved all those other random deaths.

I think it’s fair to say that Sudden Jihad Syndrome won’t come into the picture.

Meet the new bias: same as the old bias..