A man suspected of killing two students at Brown University in the US state of Rhode Island has been found dead by police.
The suspect, whose body was found in a storage facility in New Hampshire on Thursday, is also believed to have killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno Loureiro.
Police said Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown University student and Portuguese national, died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Investigators believe he is responsible for fatally shooting two students and injuring nine other people in a Brown University lecture hall last Saturday, then killing Loureiro two days later at his home.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled there as a graduate student studying physics from autumn 2000 to the spring of 2001.
“He has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.
Neves Valente and Loureiro previously attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, US attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said.
Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, the biggest engineering school in Portugal, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page.
The same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the institution’s then-president in February 2000.
He had studied at Brown on a student visa, and eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, Foley said.
His last known residence was in Miami.
After officials revealed his identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the United States.
Police are still working to establish the motive behind the attack.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said there are still “a lot of unknowns”.
“We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” he added.
Neves Valente was found after police posted images of a person of interest, which led to a witness posting their suspicions on the social media forum Reddit.
Police tracked his car as he drove from Rhode Island, where Brown University is located, to the suburbs of Boston, where video footage showed him entering an apartment building near where Loureiro lived.
About an hour later, Neves Valente was seen entering the storage facility in New Hampshire, where he was found dead, Foley said.
Loureiro joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of its largest laboratories.
He had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.
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