One person was killed and another wounded during a highway shootout after an attempt to arrest members of an armed group that occupied a national wildlife refuge in the US state of Oregon.
The FBI said in a statement on Tuesday that one individual “who was a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased”.
Ammon Bundy, 40 – the leader of the group that occupied the federal government land for the past three weeks – was among six others arrested.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo reported the man killed was identified as LaVoy Finicum, the group’s second-in-command.
Elizondo said the shootout happened on a highway not far from the refuge. “It appears the FBI and local police initiated an operation to stop the militiamen,” he said.
Our correspondent said an unknown number of group members were believed to be inside the refuge, but at most 15 or 20 people had been holding the site.“You would suspect that this could lead them to now going into the wildlife refuge to arrest other people,” he said.
Speaking to Al Jazeera’s AJ+ in January , Finicum said he had joined the occupation to defend freedom and rejected claims the standoff was racially motivated.“My heart goes out to anyone who has violence perpretated on them…we welcome any support from any community, freedom has no colour,” Finicum said.
JJ McNab, a Washington DC-based writer on anti-government extremism, said several well known anti-government figures had reportedly been on their way to the refuge.
“I think that a lot of people were on the way to join the group. Some of names recently shown up … are a little bit scary. They idolise people like Timothy McVeigh ,” McNab told Al Jazeera.McNab said her concern now was for children still possibly inside the refuge and a further escalation of violence.
Bundy’s militia, which has included people from as far away as Arizona and Michigan, seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2 as part of a long-running dispute over public lands in the western United States.
Bundy is the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who was involved in a high-profile 2014 standoff with the government over grazing rights.
“LaVoy Finicum was shot and murdered in cold blood today in Burns Oregon … He had his hands up and was shot three times,” Cliven Bundy said in a Facebook post
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