by Our Foreign Desk

COLLEAGUES of two murdered US journalists joined hands in mourning on air yesterday as details of the killer’s motives emerged.

National broadcaster ABC News said it received a 23-page fax statement from killer Vester Flanagan three hours after he shot former WDBJ TV colleagues Alison Parker and Adam Ward on air. He later shot himself dead.

Mr Flanagan, who broadcast under the pseudonym Bryce Williams, had been fired from the local TV station in Roanoake, Virginia, in 2013 and had to be escorted from the building by police, said the station’s former news director Dan Dennison.

Mr Flanagan had “a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the station,” said Mr Dennison.

“All of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded,” he said, adding that the station found “no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man.”

Mr Flanagan described himself as a gay black man who had been mistreated by people of all races.

He wrote that he was a “human powderkeg” that was “just waiting to go BOOM!!!!” and had bought a gun two days after June’s Charleston church massacre with the intention of retaliating against the racially motivated attack.

Following the shooting on Wednesday, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) president Jim Boumelha said: “Our hearts go out to the victims’ families, colleagues and to the US media community as a whole.”

“This terrible incident serves a sad reminder that violence against journalists is spiralling out of control all around the world,” said IFJ general secretary Beth Costa.

On Wednesday, supermarket chain Wal-Mart announced that it would stop selling the AR-15 rifle — a version of the military M16 and M4 assault rifles — and other semi-automatic weapons.

Company spokesman Kory Lundberg claimed that the decision was due to low demand for the weapons rather than political pressure.

But the Trinity Church on Wall Street in New York, which owns stock in Wal-Mart, sued the company last year over its refusal to allow shareholders to decide whether the chain should sell guns.

Rector William Lupfer said the church was “pleased to hear Wal-Mart will no longer sell the kinds of weapons that have caused such devastation and loss in communities across our country.”