Thursday, January 07, 2010
Police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer said officers were seeking a gunman and talking to witnesses of the attack, which happened about 7:45 p.m. He did not identify the victims.
The store, Seward Market and Halal Meat, is in the city's Seward neighborhood, a middle-class area south of downtown with a significant population of Somali immigrants.
Abdirizak Bihi, director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis, told the Star Tribune that the victims were Somali immigrants and cousins who had pooled their money to buy the market. A call to Bihi's cell phone by The Associated Press went unanswered and his voice mailbox was full.
The triple slayings come after a year in which homicides fell sharply in Minneapolis, as they did in many other cities. The city had 19 homicides in 2009, the lowest number in more than two decades and far below the city's high of 97 in 1995.