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A man walked up to two police officers guarding the Pentagon, US military headquarters in Washington, DC, and “without emotion”, according to the head of the Pentagon police, started shooting them. The officers, who have non-life-threatening graze injuries, returned fire and critically shot the man, John Patrick Bedell, who later died at a nearby hospital. Several shots were fired at 18:40 local time, at the busy subway entrance that leads to the large Pentagon complex. Bedell, 36, grew up in the area and had been a graduate student in physics at San Jose University in California, according to the Washington Post.

The newspaper notes that “The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon – the U.S. capital’s ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 – came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, base allegedly by a US Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings. In the immediate aftermath Thursday, investigators did not think terrorism was involved but were not ruling that out and did not discuss possible motives.

Links to other sites: CNN, Washington Post