Police trade cryptic messages with sniper suspect
( 2002-10-22 10:50 ) (7 )

A person believed to be the Washington sniper has been communicating with police and detectives were Monday night desperately trying to make contact with the killer again.

Their attempts followed a dramatic day in which hopes that the gunman had been caught were dashed.

Two men were arrested after armed police surrounded a white van parked next to a public telephone eight miles from where a man now known to be the sniper’s twelfth victim was shot and critically wounded on Saturday night.

The situation was confused, however, when minutes later the police chief leading the investigation, Charles Moose, delivered a cryptic messages to the sniper.

The Montgomery County Police Chief had on late on Saturday night revealed that a note had been left in woods near the Ponderosa restaurant in Ashland, Virginia, where the 37-year-old victim had been shot on Saturday. “You gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you provided,” Mr Moose said during a brief news conference then.

Yesterday afternoon, minutes after the dramatic arrests, Mr Moose appeared before the press again. “The message that needs to be delivered is that we are going to respond to a message that we have received,” he said. “We are preparing our response at this time.” He then left the podium.

A police source told CNN that the chief’s far-from-clear statements had been aimed directly at the sniper. “The person he is addressing will know exactly what he means,” the source said.

Later in the day Mr Moose delivered a third statement: “The person who you called could not hear everything that you said. The audio was unclear and we want to get it right. Call us back so that we can clearly understand.”

Monday night police sources were indicating that the sniper was still at large.

The efforts to resume contact with the sniper followed the arrest of the two men, which was initially billed as a breakthrough. They were later described as “non-documented” workers – illegal immigrants – from Mexico and Guatemala. The first man, a 24-year-old Mexican, was pulled out of the white van at 8.30am as he was speaking into a roadside telephone from the driver’s seat, on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, about 90 miles south of Washington.

A second unidentified man was arrested “in the vicinity” shortly afterwards.

Shortly after Saturday’s shooting, now confirmed by ballistic tests to be the sniper’s twelfth attack, the FBI sniper hotline had received a call from a man saying that a note had been left in woods next to the Ponderosa restaurant.

That call was traced to a public telephone near to where yesterday’s first arrest was made, outside a petrol station on a busy intersection a few miles from the centre of Richmond. The note, police sources said, was “lengthy” and “hinted at a demand for money”.

With the area already under heavy surveillance by undercover FBI agents, officers from the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau and Secret Servicemen, witnesses said that the white van, a Plymouth Voyager with temporary Virginian number plates, had been parked next to the phone for about ten minutes when three heavily armed officers began approaching on their haunches from the rear.

Keith Underwood, who works at Royal Oldsmobiles next door to the Exxon garage, took several Polaroids as the dramatic scene unfolded.

“They were down in a hunch, very slow, very careful,” he told The Times. “They waited a few moments, then about eight other officers arrived out of nowhere. They pulled on bulletproof vests, whipped out these big guns. It was an incredible show of force, incredibly impressive.

“One officer approached the driver’s door, grabbed the handle, and then grabbed it again, slid the door open, and they had him out of there in a second. I was excited at first but then I realised the seriousness of what was happening.”

Monday night sources said that the two men had not been involved in the attacks and would be deported to Latin America for immigration violations. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” a senior law enforcement source in Washington said.