A 41-year-old man in the U.S. has been executed for killing a convenience store clerk from India during a shooting spree in 2001 that he had said was retaliation for the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Mark Stroman, a Texas death row inmate, shot at least three men he mistook for Arabs in the weeks after the attacks, killing two of them.
He was convicted of killing Vasudev Patel, 49, during the attempted robbery of a convenience store near Dallas in October 2001. He was also charged in the fatal shooting of Waqar Hasan, 46, a Muslim born in Pakistan.
He was executed after the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a last-minute appeal by one of his victims to save his life.
The lone survivor, Rais Bhuiyan, a native of Bangladesh, had sued to stop the execution, saying his religious beliefs as a Muslim told him to forgive.
Earlier Stroman had said his 2001 Dallas-area shooting rampage was in retaliation for the September 11 terrorist attacks. He had described the attacks as a patriotic response to terrorism.
Stroman blamed the shootings on the loss of a sister in the collapse of one of the World Trade Center towers, although prosecutors said in court documents there’s no firm evidence she ever existed.
“I wanted those Arabs to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil much like the mindset of chaos and bedlam that they were already accustomed to in their home country,” he said on a website devoted to his case. But he ended up shooting down South Asians.
