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| FBI agents and police confronted the suspect on Wednesday morning before a pursuit and a volley of gunfire which killed him. |
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Austin bomber 'blows himself up' with seventh device as police closed in
Daily Mail
Tue March 20, 2018
The Austin bomber is dead after blowing himself up as police FBI agents tired to arrest him in the early hours of Wednesday.
Officers used cell phones, security video and store receipts to track the man to a hotel in Williamson County before swooping in the early hours, local media reports.
A chase broke out before the man detonated another device, killing himself, KVUE reports. It had earlier been reported that he was shot dead.
Two people were killed and six injured in a series of bombings that left Austin gripped in fear and stoked racial divisions in the city.
While the motive behind the attacks is still unclear, the first two victims came from prominent African American families while the third was Hispanic, leading to accusations that ethnic minorities were the target.
President Trump was also criticized for failing to condemn the bombings at an early stage, with a local NAACP chapter saying that if the victims had been white, he 'would be apoplectic'.
Officers had anticipated that the man would detonate another bomb, KVUE says.
The death comes just hours after CBS published CCTV showing the bombing suspect at a Fed-Ex office in the south of the city.
The images show a man, possibly wearing a wig and gloves, delivering two packages to the store around 7.30pm on Sunday.
One of the packages subsequently exploded on a conveyor belt at a FedEx sorting facility outside of San Antonio in Schertz.
The other was intercepted at a facility near Austin airport and was later confirmed to contain a bomb.
Authorities believe the same person is connected to the two packages that surfaced Tuesday is also responsible for the four other explosions that began on March 2nd, killing two people and injuring six.
Austin Police Department tweeted that they were working on an officer-involved shooting near the highway, but gave no further details.
The I-35 has been closed in both directions while images from the scene show dozens of law enforcement vehicles parked along the highway.
The first incident occurred on March 2 when a package bomb exploded at a northeast Austin home, killing a 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House.
Two more package bombs then exploded further south on March 12. Draylen Mason, 17, was killed and his mother was wounded after they opened a package in their kitchen.
A 75-year-old Hispanic woman named by family as Esperanza Herrera was severely injured when a package bomb exploded at her home a few hours later.
The trip wire explosion on Sunday came just hours after police made an unusual direct appeal to whomever was responsible for three package bombs that killed two in the past month.
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