NEW YORK –The two New York City police officers who were ambushed and killed Saturday afternoon are Wenjin Liu and Rafael Ramos, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio described the killing of two police officers Saturday as an execution. “It’s clear this was an assassination,” he said. The mayor added: “It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on everything we hold dear.”
We are learning more about the ambush from a news conference that ended around 8:10 p.m. with police officials and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio discussing the shooting deaths of two police officers.
The two officers killed in Brooklyn were “shot and killed with no warning, no provocation,” Bratton said. “They were quite simply, assassinated,” Bratton said at an evening news conference.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder condemned the killing of two police officers in New York on Saturday, calling the attack “an unspeakable act of barbarism.”
New York City’s police commissioner says the gunman who ambushed and killed two police officers had made online posts that were “very anti-police.”
Police Commissioner William Bratton choked up at a news conference Saturday afternoon as he talked about the fatal shootings of two officers in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
Bratton says gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot and wounded his former girlfriend in Baltimore earlier Saturday and made posts from her Instagram account.
Authorities didn’t get into the specifics of the contents of the posts, but two officials told The Associated Press that he posted about shooting two “pigs” in retaliation for the death of Eric Garner. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Authorities say the gunman fatally shot himself after killing the officers.
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