NAN
The gunman, who shot six people at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Centre in New York, United States, on Friday, Dr. Henry Michael Bello, has been identified as a Nigerian.
Some Nigerians in New York, who knew Bello, confirmed this on Friday.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) has also identified him as a Nigerian-born doctor.
Bello, 45, shot dead a woman, on the 17th floor and injured at least six others on the 16th floor, before killing himself the NYPD Commissioner, James O’Neil, said.
Five of his victims were seriously injured and “fighting for their lives.”
Bello went into his former workplace wearing a white lab coat with an AR-15 machine gun hidden underneath with the intention of targeting the same individual.
NYPD officials said Bello asked for a specific doctor on the 16th floor but when he was told the doctor was not there, he became angry and started shooting at everyone.
Officials said Bello tried to set himself on fire before committing suicide.
Reports said Bello, who was hired at the hospital in August 2014 as a house physician, had been arrested in the past for sex abuse, turnstile jumping, burglary and public urination.
In September 2004, he was arrested and charged with sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment after a 23-year-old woman told officers he had grabbed her crotch area outside a building on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and tried to penetrate her through her underwear.
Court records indicated that in September 2004, Bello pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, a misdemeanour, and was sentenced to community service, while the felony sexual abuse charge was dismissed, according to reports.
He was going to be fired by the hospital, after reports of sexual harassments, but instead chose to resign in February 2015 in lieu of termination, reports added.
Reports from the New York State Education Department said Bello had received a limited permit to practice as an international medical graduate in order to gain experience so he could be licensed.
The permit was issued on July 1, 2014, and expired on July 1, 2016, while he also had a pharmacy technician license that had been issued in California in 2006.
He went to medical school on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean.
