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Muslim link to Rio de Janeiro school shooter.
Although one Rio de Janeiro newspaper and at least two US newspapers reported the Muslim link to 23-year old Wellington Menezes de Oliveira who fatally shot 13 students, instantly killing 12 of them at the Escola Municipal Tasso da Silveria School
in the western Realeno area of Rio de Janeiro on Thursday, April 7, no major news wire services anywhere in the world touched the Islamic implications. In fact, among the reporting newspapers were several in the Mideast. The 13th student, a boy, died in a local hospital about 12 hours after the shooting took place.

Roselane de Oliveiro, the shooter's sister, told Band News—a Rio de Janeiro radio station—that her brother had gotten very strange over the last few months and that he appeared to "...have gotten closer to Islam and let his beard grow long....He had no friends," she said, "and spent all his time on the Internet reading related issues, and it was very strange—very secretive."

Rio de Janeiro police were quick to distance themselves from the Band News radio interview, telling the media there was no evidence that the attack had either a religious or political motive. When Police Colonel Djalma Beltrami described de Oliveiro's "suicide note," he described it as "...the words of a person who no longer believes in anything, full of sentences that made no sense, and references to Islamic fundamentalism." Yet, even with that statement by a ranking police official, the official statement of the Brazilian authorities was that there was no evidence that the attack was either theologically or politically motivated.

A CNN affiliate, Record TV reported at 9:46 a.m. MDT on April 7 that it had received information that, in the note he left behind, de Oliveiro mentioned he had HIV. No other report has mentioned that information, nor that HIV was a contributing factor in the slaughter of 13 children and the wounding of 18 others. It is likely the report was bogus since no other media sources reported that de Oliveiro might have AIDS.

At 8 a.m. local time (11:00 GMT) on the morning of April 7, 2011 Wellington de Oliveira entered Escola Municipal Tasso DA Silveria School, using his former student identification card and telling school staff that he was there to give a student lecture. He went to an 8th grade classroom (some reports say the classroom was on the first floor, others say the third floor) and, without speaking, de Oliveira took a pistol from a backpack and began shooting.

Eyewitness accounts reported that de Oliveira lined up 13 children—11 girls and 2 boys—ages from 10 to 15 years of age facing a wall in one of the classrooms, and executed them. A government official told ABC News that some of the victims were head shot, and some were shot in the chest or abdomen. Most were shot in the head. Most of the children begged for their lives. Those not in the immediate line of fire begged de Oliveira not to shoot, and then begged him to stop shooting. One of the survivors, student Jade Ramos, said when de Oliveira told the students he was there to give a speech, he began shouting at them: "I'm going to kill all of you!" Ramos continued, saying: "He had already [shot] a lot of children on the first floor and in the yard...He kept telling the children to face the wall and was shooting at their heads. The children kept begging, 'No, please!' There was a lot of blood, children agonizing on the stairs.'"

Police were alerted of the shootings when two students ran into two officers on patrol about two blocks from the school. The officers, on foot, ran to the school. One of them, Officer Mario Alves, ran into de Oliveira on the second floor and shot him in the leg. Alves said when he shot the assailant in the leg, de Oliveiro fell down the stairs. Unable to flee, de Oliveiro then shot himself in the head, ending the horrific murder mayhem.

De Oliveiro carried two handguns and enough ammunition to kill a lot more children than the final tally. ABC was the only media report to note that the 400 student Escola Municipal Tasso DA Silveria School had no security guards on duty when de Oliveira showed up. It is very likely that had security been there, de Oliveira would have been stopped at the door and whatever confrontation occurred would have happened at the door, likely saving the lives of the children who were killed. But, since de Oliveira did not plan to leave the school alive, people were going to die that day.

While the authorities claim that de Oliveira planned to commit suicide, there was nothing in his note that said he planned to take his own life. He did not, however, expect to exit the school alive. It appears he expected to die in a blaze of perverted glory at the hands of police officials. His "suicide" note explained how, and where, he wanted to be buried. It also said his body could not be touched by anyone who was "impure." (Which suggests an Islamic mindset, not wanting to be touched by infidels.) His corpse, he said, needed to be properly cared for—bathed and wrapped in a white sheet that he left in a bag in the first room where he would begin shooting. Under Islam, the Muslim's last words are a declaration of faith: "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah." Upon death, the deceased's body is temporarily covered with a clean sheet. The family of the deceased then washes and shrouds the body. If the deceased died a martyr, that procedure is not performed since the martyr is buried in the clothes he died in.

The body is then wrapped in a kafan (a clean white cloth). Further, in Islam, where visiting the graves of the dead was once forbidden, Mohammed admonished the believers in the Hadeeth of the Prophet to visit the graves of the martyrs. So, while authorities may have revised references to deity to defuse the anti-Muslim backlash, the customs de Oliveira wrote into what was more his "Last Will and Testament" than a suicide note, were decidedly Islamic, not Christian.

"If possible," de Oliveira's note—portions of which were read by the London Globe on the Globe's TV network website—said, "I want to be buried next to my mother..." De Oliveira's next statement, which was released by authorities may have been altered to disguise his theological thinking. The report described de Oliveira's references to deity as "God," not "Allah." If de Oliveira had been radicalized, his note would likely have referred to deity as "Allah." De Oliveira said: "A follower of God must visit my grave at least once and ask God to forgive me for what I have done."

When Al Jazeera reported on the shooting, they noted that the western Realeno part of Rio de Janeiro is a slum area associated with the drug gangs that control vast areas of the poor sections of Rio de Janeiro. Al Jazeera suggested that it was possible that de Oliveira's visit to the school may have been drug related. In recent months, Al Jazeera reported, "...Rio's government...made considerable advances against drug gangs that control vast areas of the city's slum communities. But crime remains a problem in the beachside tourist haven. Authorities have stepped up slum pacification efforts that created a permanent police police presence in poor neighborhoods..." Most Muslim newspapers reported on the shooting as a "western travesty" that would never happen in an Islamic nation. But when we know, from watching Islamic suicide bombers attack Israeli school buses filled with young Jewish children, or attack open air markets in Judea discriminately targeting Jewish shoppers, we quickly learn that to the terrorist, that what Americans care most about become the best targets. On Sept. 12, 2007,Glenn Beck did a 6-part series on al Qaeda's strategy of attacking schools and the mass slaughter of small children. Click here and watch Beck's video—made while he was still on CNN.

Well, forwhatever it's worth, once again, you have my two cents worth on this subject. Until next time...

 

 

 

 

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