Several alleged 4chan users have been linked the shooting of five “Black Lives Matter” protesters in Minneapolis on Monday night. A video posted on a ‘BLM’ Facebook account (WARNING: contains profanity) shows several masked men making references to 4chan’s /pol/ and /k/ boards.
UPDATE as of Wednesday evening at 7:30 p.m.:
According to the New York Observer, BlackPowerRanger might be Lance Scarsella, 23. He was arrested and charged with assault in connection with the protest shooting. Some activists on Twitter said that SaigaMarine is a 32-year-old Hispanic man who was arrested on Tuesday and released later on. Two other suspects are also in custody related to the shooting. Police said SaigaMarine wasn’t at the protests when the shooting occurred.
Meanwhile, The Daily Dot has more on the suspects involved in the Black Lives Matter shooting.
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The earlier article:
It’s not exactly clear when the video was captured, but it was posted on the account several days before the shooting.
On Tuesday, Minneapolis police arrested a white man and a Hispanic man in connection with the shooting, the Star Tribune reported.
It’s still unclear any of the men shown in the videos were in any way connected to the shooting, as police have not released any names.
Oleuchi Omeoga, a protester who saw the shooting, told AP that the suspects were three masked men. She said the men “weren’t supposed to be” at the protest encampment.
Other witnesses told the Star Tribune that as protesters tried to herd the group away from the area, they opened fire on several protesters, hitting five of them.
Video posted on Black Lives Matter page Nov. 20
For the uninitiated, 4chan is an anonymous imageboard that is dedicated to a wide variety of interests, from music and anime to politics and pornography. Perhaps the two most notorious boards on the website are random board /b/, which gets the most traffic and produces a wide array of bizarre memes, and /pol/, the board dedicated to politics, which interprets news events via a far-right, pro-white lens.
The video appeared on the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis Facebook page, which wrote: “Last night 2 white supremacists, one carrying a pistol, showed up to our peaceful protest at the 4th precinct.”
Apparently, a user on the /k/ board, who has the unique ID (“tripcode”) SaigaMarine, was shown speaking in the footage on the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis Facebook page. The man speaking the video says, “This is SaigaMarine, this is BlackPowderRanger... we’re gonna see what these [expletive] dindus are up to.” “Dindu,” as in “dindu nuffin,” is a racist term for black people used by some 4chan members. Users on the /k/ board Tuesday were making frequent threads and references to SaigaMarine.
