Federal prosecutors have filed charges against a man suspected of fatally shooting two Israeli embassy staff workers in the United States capital of Washington, DC.
In a federal court on Thursday, Elias Rodriguez was accused of two counts of first-degree murder, as well as charges of murdering foreign officials, causing death with a firearm and discharging a firearm in a crime of violence.
In a news conference afterwards, interim US Attorney Jeanine Pirro warned that those charges were only the beginning — and that her prosecutors were combing through evidence for other crimes.
“This is a horrific crime, and these crimes are not going to be tolerated by me and by this office,” Pirro said.
“We’re going to continue to investigate this as a hate crime and a crime of terrorism, and we will add additional charges as the evidence warrants.”
Rodriguez is accused of shooting Israeli citizen Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, an American, both employees of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.
The attack took place around 9:08pm US Eastern time on Wednesday evening (01:08 GMT Thursday), as the two employees were leaving an event hosted by the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee at the Capital Jewish Museum. Both were pronounced dead at the scene.
Israeli embassy staff have said that the young couple were set to be engaged in the coming days.
“A young couple — at the beginning of their life’s journey, about to be engaged, in another country — had their bodies removed in the cold of the night, in a foreign city, in a body bag. We are not going to tolerate that anymore,” said Pirro, appearing to allude primarily to Lischinsky’s foreign roots.
“This is the kind of case that picks at old sores and old scars, because these kinds of cases remind us of what has happened in the past that we can never and must never forget.”
She pointed out that the Wednesday night attack took place at a museum that includes one of Washington’s oldest synagogues in the centre of the city.
Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith said that the suspect chanted, “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” after the shooting. Rodriguez, who hailed from Chicago, appears to have identified himself to police and was arrested shortly after the shooting.
An affidavit from the Federal Bureau of Investigation notes that Rodriguez told police, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”
The shooting, which has been widely condemned, comes as Israel faces growing global anger over its war on Gaza, where a blockade has left millions of Palestinians without food or basic supplies.
Experts at human rights organisations and the United Nations have compared the war, which has killed at least 53,000 people, to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Since the war began on October 7, 2023, Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities have all reported upticks in harassment and racism.
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s shooting, officials spoke out against anti-Semitism, and the administration of President Donald Trump promised to pursue every legal avenue against the suspect.
“The Department of Justice will be prosecuting the perpetrator responsible for this to the fullest extent of the law,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday. “Hatred has no place in the United States of America under President Donald Trump.”
She went on to compare antiwar protests at US universities, which have been largely peaceful, to “ anti-Semitic illegal behaviour”. Protest leaders, however, have largely disavowed anti-Jewish hate.
In the wake of the shooting, one US Congress member told Fox News that the “Palestinian cause” was “evil”. Republican Representative Randy Fine continued by suggesting the Gaza war should end like World War II did, with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
“We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender,” he said. “That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.”
Separately, the Israeli government denounced the shooting as an attack against its state.
“We are witness to the terrible cost of the antisemitism and wild incitement against the State of Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.