A suspect has been arrested in the shooting of three students of Palestinian descent in the US town of Burlington, Vermont, CNN reported early this morning, an attack that police are investigating as a racially motivated crime.

A gunman shot and wounded three students on a street near the University of Vermont Saturday night and then fled, Burlington police said.

CNN reported that the shooter, identified as Jason J. Eaton, 48, was arrested yesterday Sunday afternoon.

Burlington police and the city’s mayor’s office have not yet commented on the report.

Two of the victims are US citizens and the third is a legal US resident. All of them are in their 20s, police said. Two of the students were wearing the traditional Palestinian headscarf when they were targeted, the same source added.

The victims were reportedly speaking Arabic when they were attacked, according to the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a non-governmental Palestinian rights group, which noted that the attacker opened fire on the three men after first shouting and harassing them. . The police, for their part, have announced that the attacker fired four times at the students without saying a word.

The episode comes at a time when the US is experiencing an increase in Islamophobic and anti-Semitic acts, such as violent attacks and online harassment, since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on October 7.

“In these charged times, one cannot look at this incident and not suspect that it may be a racially motivated crime,” said Burlington Police Chief John Murad.

“The fact that this incident may have been motivated by hate is terrifying,” said city mayor Miro Weinberger, noting that police are “looking into this possibility as a matter of priority.”

The families of the victims in a joint statement called on the authorities to treat the attack as a hate crime. The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) also requested the same.

“The rise in anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian sentiments we are experiencing is unprecedented and this is yet another example that this hatred can turn violent,” commented ADC Executive Director Abed Ayoub.

The families identified the victims as Hisham Ortani, a student at Brown University in Rhode Island, Kinan Abdel Hamid, who attends Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and Tahsin Ahmed, a student at Trinity College in Connecticut.

All of them were graduates of the Friends of Ramallah School, a private secondary school in the occupied West Bank run by Quakers.

Two of the students were visiting the family of the third in Burlington for Thanksgiving.

Police said yesterday that all three remain under medical observation: two with bullet wounds to the torso and the third to the legs. “Two are in a stable condition, while the third has sustained much more serious injuries,” he explained.