Quick Summary
- Released transcripts contradict claims about Claudio Neves Valente’s statements during the shooting.
- Valente said he didn’t recall shouting ‘Allah-Akbar’ during the Brown University attack.
- Valente expressed no regrets after killing 2 students at Brown and killing an MIT professor two days later.
The man who committed a mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island and killed two students has denied claims that he said “Allah Akbar” during the tragic incident, according to transcripts released by police.
The United States Department of Justice recovered four videos that suspect Claudio Neves Valente filmed of himself after the shooting, with authorities recently releasing the transcripts of the recordings that appear to contradict rumors about what Valente said during the shooting.
On Dec. 13, Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, entered the Barus and Holley Building at Brown University in Providence and shot at a group of students, killing two and wounding nine.
Two days later, Valente fatally shot Nuno Loureiro, who taught plasma physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at his home. Valente was later found dead from an apparent suicide at a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire.
In one video, Valente addressed the claim that he had shouted “Allah Akbar” (a chant typically used by radicalized Islamic extremists) while shooting up the Brown classroom.
“I do not remember having said anything,” Valente was quoted as saying. “If I did say something, it must have been some kind of an — an exclamation, uhm, because I thought that one.”
Valente added that when he entered the auditorium, he said he only saw “one guy down there.”
“And I thought … I must have made an exclamation like ‘Oh no!’, or something like that, to express that it was empty, that is, if I said something like that. I thought that the people had left.”
Valente insisted that he didn’t harbor “hatred toward America” and didn’t have any “love for it.” He thought it was a “mistake” coming to the U.S., adding that “I have no love.”
“I said I had no hatred, but I also have no love. It’s the same thing with Portugal, and most of the places where I have been,” he continued.
Valente expressed no remorse for the Brown shooting or the murder of Loureiro, declaring that “I am not going to apologize, because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me” and “I don’t give a damn about how you judge me or what you think of me.”
The murdered students were identified as Ella Cook, a devout Christian and member of Brown’s College Republicans chapter, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a student from Uzbekistan who had planned to become a neurosurgeon.
Given the political views of Cook and the recent murder of prominent conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk, somespeculated that the shooting was ideologically motivated.
But in the released transcripts, Valente made no apparent reference to Cook or her ideological views and only mentioned President Donald Trump by name once.
“The overwhelming majority of things that are going to be said, I can already imagine. In fact, I was already reading, uhm, I particularly like Trump’s s—, to have called me an animal, which is true,” said Valente.
“I am an animal and he is also, but uhm, I have no love — I have no hatred towards America, I also have no hatred at all. This was an issue … of opportunity.”
