Two National Guard soldiers were shot and critically wounded on Wednesday in downtown Washington near the White House in what officials described as a targeted ambush, and the suspect was in custody after suffering gunshot wounds during the attack.
Investigators identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national from Washington State, according to two Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The attack is being investigated as an act of terrorism, one official said.
Lakanwal came to the US in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, according to the second official, a Biden-era program to resettle thousands of Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the Afghanistan war and were vulnerable to reprisals from the ruling Taliban after the US withdrawal. He was processed through Washington Dulles International Airport on September 8 of that year.
Lakanwal applied for asylum in December 2024 and was approved on April 23 of this year, according to the official, three months after President Donald Trump took office. He has no criminal history.
Trump, who was at his resort in Florida at the time of the attack, released a prerecorded video statement late on Wednesday calling the shooting "an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror." He said his administration would "re-examine" all Afghans who came to the US during Joe Biden's presidency.
The two soldiers, members of the West Virginia National Guard, were part of a "high-visibility patrol" around 2:15pm ET (1915 GMT) near the corner of 17th and I streets, a few blocks from the White House. The suspect came around a corner and "ambushed" them, Metropolitan Police Assistant Chief Jeff Carroll said at a press briefing.
After an exchange of gunfire, other National Guard troops subdued the shooter, he said. The two wounded soldiers were in critical condition at local hospitals, FBI Director Kash Patel said.
"This is a targeted attack," Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said at the briefing.
The shooter appeared to have acted alone, officials said.
Trump ordered 500 more guard soldiers deployed to Washington, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters, joining about 2,200 already in the city as part of the president's contentious immigration and crime crackdown targeting Democratic-led cities.
US Vice President JD Vance, who was in Kentucky on Wednesday, said in a post on X that the shooting proved that the Trump administration's immigration policy was justified.
"We must redouble our efforts to deport people with no right to be in our country," he said.
Critics of the Trump administration's immigration policy say it has employed illegally harsh tactics and swept up immigrants indiscriminately, including some with no criminal history and others here legally.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services late on Wednesday said that it has stopped processing all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals indefinitely.
Witnesses describe chaotic scene
The shooting unfolded near Farragut Square, a popular lunch spot for office workers just a few blocks from the White House. The park, where light posts are wrapped in wreaths and bows for the holiday season, is flanked by fast-casual restaurants and a coffee shop, as well as two metro stops.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene after shots were fired, with pedestrians fleeing.
Mike Ryan, 55, said he was on his way to buy lunch nearby when he heard what sounded like gunfire. He ran half a block away and heard another round of apparent gunfire.
When he made his way back to the scene, he saw two National Guard soldiers on the ground across the street, with people trying to resuscitate one of them. At the same time, other guard troops had pinned someone on the ground, Ryan said.
Another witness, Emma McDonald, said she saw one of the soldiers carried away on a stretcher minutes after the shooting, his head covered in blood and an automated compression system attached to his chest.
National Guard soldiers have been in Washington since Trump's initial deployment in August, a move that was opposed by local officials and criticized by Democrats. The guard troops in the city include contingents from the District of Columbia as well as Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia and Alabama.
Trump, a Republican, has suggested repeatedly that crime has disappeared from the capital as a result of the deployment, an assertion at odds with the police department's official crime statistics.
Flights to Washington's Ronald Reagan airport briefly paused
The US Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that flights to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were briefly paused following the shooting of two members of the National Guard near the White House.
The ground stop temporarily "paused arrivals into Reagan Washington International Airport because of the locations of aircraft involved in responding to today’s shooting incident," the FAA said in a statement. "Normal operations have resumed."
The brief disruption came a day before Thanksgiving, which is among the busiest periods of the year for air travel in the United States.
