Charlie Kirk shooting latest: search for killer under way as Trump vows crackdown on ‘political violence’ | Charlie Kirk shooting
What we know so far
Here is a summary of what we know and the developments so far:
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Kirk, a 31-year-old influential ally of President Donald Trump, was fatally shot on Wednesday while speaking at a university in Utah, triggering a manhunt for a lone sniper who the governor said had carried out a “political assassination”.
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Authorities said they still had no suspect in custody as of Wednesday night, about eight hours after the midday shooting at Utah Valley University campus in Orem during an event attended by 3,000 people.
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On Wednesday night, the campus of Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem remained on lockdown, with traffic cones and flashing police cars blocking every entrance. At the nearby Timpanogos regional hospital, where Kirk was taken after the shooting and pronounced dead, roughly a dozen people held a vigil – one of several that took place that evening across the region – at the hospital’s entrance.
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The lone perpetrator suspected of firing the single gunshot that killed Kirk remained “at large”, said the Utah Department of Public Safety’s commissioner, Beau Mason. The shot apparently came from a distant rooftop on campus.
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Two men were detained and one was interrogated by law enforcement but both were subsequently released, state police said on Wednesday night.
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Donald Trump blamed “the radical left” for the shooting and promised a crackdown, saying its “rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now”. In his address from the Oval Office Trump also provided a list of incidents of what he termed “radical left political violence” while not including violence against Democrats.
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Cellphone video clips of Kirk’s killing posted online showed him addressing a large outdoor crowd on the campus, about 40 miles (64 km) south of Salt Lake City, about 12.20pm local time when a gunshot rang out. Kirk moved his hand towards his neck as he fell off his chair, sending onlookers running.
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Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, said: “This is a dark day for our state, it’s a tragic day for our nation. I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination.” With the suspect still at large, there was no clear evidence of motive for the shooting, he said.
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Trump ordered all government US flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday in Kirk’s honour.
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In Washington, an attempt to observe a moment of silence for Kirk on the floor of the US House of Representatives degenerated into shouting between Democrats and Republicans.
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Kirk’s appearance on Wednesday was the first in a planned 15-event “American Comeback Tour” at universities around the country, where he would typically invite attendees to debate him live.
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Nancy Pelosi, Gabrielle Giffords, Steve Scalise, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Robert F Kennedy Jr – all US public figures who have experienced political violence themselves – paid their respects and condemned the shooting. Globally, leaders including the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney and UK prime minister Keir Starmer shared messages of condmenation at political violence.
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New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani paid his respects to Charlie Kirk and condemned gun violence in the United States. In a video shared on X of Mamdani speaking at the annual Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JFREJ) fundraiser, he took a moment to first address the news of the shooting and to speak more widely about the “plague” of gun violence in the country.
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Utah Valley University has informed students, faculty and staff that its campuses will be closed for the rest of the week, and all classes and campus events will be suspended until next Monday. The school’s leaders said they are “shocked and saddened by the tragic passing of Charlie Kirk, a guest to our campus” and “grieve with our students, faculty, and staff who bore witness to this unspeakable tragedy”.
Key events
Mason adds that officials have been able to trace the shooters movement after the attack: “He moved to the other side of the building, jumped off of the building, and fled off of the campus into a neighborhood.”
He goes on to say that investigators “do have good video footage of this individual”, but said they would not release the footage at this time. “We’re working through some technologies and some ways to identify this individual. If we are unsuccessful, we will reach out to you as the media, and we will push that publicly to help us identify them,” he says.
Utah officials ask public to be ‘patient’ as they search for Kirk’s shooter
Utah officials are speaking at a press conference now. The commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, Beau Mason, asked the public to be ‘patient’ as they continue for the shooter who killed Charlie Kirk.
He added that the two individuals that were taken into custody, who were later released, “were not suspects” but “people of interest”. Mason said that federal and state officers “do not deserve harassment” as they continue their investigation.
One of the UK’s most prominent far-right activists, Tommy Robinson, has said that a “free speech event”, scheduled for Saturday 13 September is now “more important than ever”, in light of Charlie Kirk’s killing.
“Charlie stood for me, Charlie stood for Britain & on the 13th Britain will stand to honour him,” Robinson wrote.
Earlier, Robinson said that “our sadness and our righteous anger can be seen, heard, and felt everywhere across the world”, a day after Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University.
We’re due to hear updates on the shooting from the FBI and the Utah Department of Public Safety at a press conference, scheduled for 9am ET.
We’ll bring you the latest here.
The FBI is seeking more information on the shooter who killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk, at the Utah Valley University campus event. The Salt Lake City field office has set up a tip line to encourage people with any details to come forward.
This, after two subjects taken into custody on Wednesday were released, and a manhunt is under way.
Donald Trump, and first lady Melania Trump, are due to attend an event at the Pentagon at 8:45am ET, in observance of the 9/11 attacks.
The press will be present, so we’ll bring you the latest lines as we get them.
Charlie Kirk directed most of his rhetoric at the US political scene, but he also strayed into foreign affairs, drawing both favourable and critical comparisons between life in the US and in other countries on his shows and doing the occasional speaking tour.
In May, Kirk visited the UK, debating students at Oxford and Cambridge universities and appearing on the conservative GB News channel. Days before he was fatally shot in Utah he took his message to relatively new audiences on a tour to South Korea and Japan.
Last weekend he addressed likeminded politicians and activists at a symposium in Tokyo organised by Sanseito, a rightwing populist party that shook up the political establishment in upper house elections this summer.
In Tokyo, Kirk described Sanseito, which ran in July’s elections on a “Japanese first” platform, as “all about kicking foreigners out of Japan”, where the foreign population has risen to about 3.8 million out of a total of 124 million.
Foreign residents and supporters of mass migration were, he claimed, “very quietly and secretly funnelling themselves into Japanese life. They want to erase, replace and eradicate Japan by bringing in Indonesians, by bringing in Arabs, by bringing in Muslims”.
He spoke at length about his trip in a podcast released the day before his death, returning to a familiar theme – criticising women who choose not to have children – that echoed the views of his host in Japan, the Sanseito leader, Sohei Kamiya.
In Seoul, he addressed more than 2,000 supporters at the Build Up Korea 2025 event, which drew predominantly young Christians and students from evangelical schools, representing a self-styled Korean Maga movement that has rallied around the “Yoon Again” slogan, in support of the impeached former president Yoon Suk Yeol.
At the event in Seoul, Kirk promoted conspiracy theories, including claims that China had orchestrated “stolen elections” in both the US and South Korea, that Lee Jae-myung’s recent presidential election victory had been fraudulent, and that the current government was persecuting churches and suppressing “patriotic citizens”.
Kirk said he had “learned a lot” from his time in South Korea and Japan, recalling how safe he had felt on the clean and orderly streets of Seoul, where there were “no bums, no one asking you for money”.
In his three-day UK visit in May, he clashed with students at the Cambridge Union debating society, arguing that “lockdowns were unnecessary”, “life begins at conception”, and the US Civil Rights Act was a “mistake”.
Ben Quinn
The British offshoot of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point UK has failed to match the success of its US equivalent in terms of mobilising right-wing support among students, morphing from a campus-focus to street protests.
Kirk flew to London in 2019 for its launch at a prestigious London social club and Conservative MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel were among those who praised its work. It claimed to have as many as ‘eight chapters’ in UK universities.
However, that support from influential British right-wings melted away and the group has been in the process of reinventing itself as a street protest movement, according to anti-extremism campaign group Hope not Hate.
Its recent activity is some way from the promise of Turning Point UK’s earlier incarnation, when it was chaired by George Farmer, a Conservative donor who is the son of a Tory peer and husband of the US right-wing commentator Candace Owens
But even then, the emergence of the group in Britain was described by the Labour MP, David Lammy, now Britain’s deputy prime minister, as evidence “that sinister forces are taking hold of our country” an that the Conservative Party “open promotes hard right, xenophobic bile.”
At its 2019 launch, Owens reportedly declared “we very much believe that we are in the midst of World War three,” while Kirk spoke of taking he “success story of what we’ve done in America” and applying it to the “defence all throughout Europe.”
We have a graphic which shows the Utah Valley university campus, where Charlie Kirk was killed in a shooting yesterday.
The Google Earth view shows the potential escape route on an elevated walkway.
World leaders, especially those on the far-right of politics, have issued statements on the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah on Wednesday.
The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said:
Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom. A lion-hearted friend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.
I spoke to him only two weeks ago and invited him to Israel. Sadly, that visit will not take place. We lost an incredible human being. His boundless pride in America and his valiant belief in free speech will leave a lasting impact.
Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders said:
Charlie Kirk was 100% right here. Out of respect for him and his bravery I repeat his true words that are valid for Europe as well: Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of Europe.
Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk. Condolences to his family and America.
Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier in this blog, Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni, paid tribute to Kirk, saying:
The news of the killing of Charlie Kirk, a young and popular Republican activist, is shocking.
A heinous murder, a deep wound for democracy and for those who believe in freedom.
My condolences go out to his family, his loved ones, and the American conservative community.
Here are some images coming in via the newswires:
‘What have we become?’: shock across US political parties after Charlie Kirk shooting
Ed Pilkington
Charlie Kirk’s death by an assassin’s bullet on a university campus in Utah on Wednesday has left the United States, a country already grappling with mounting political anger and polarization, in a state of profound shock bordering on despair.
Kirk, a rising star of Donald Trump’s make America great again (Maga) movement, was struck in the neck by a single shot as he addressed a large student crowd at Utah Valley University. The event had been billed as the grand opening of his 15-stop “America Comeback Tour”, but instead will be marked as the place where he uttered his last words.
The 31-year-old leader of the rightwing student group Turning Point USA was about 20 minutes into a Q&A, ironically engaging with a question on mass shootings in America, when the shot rang out. Within seconds, hundreds of students had scattered screaming from the campus lawn.
Within minutes of that, gruesome videos began to proliferate through social media, apparently undeterred by any algorithm. They showed Kirk being hit, slumping to his left side and profusely bleeding.
Long before Kirk was pronounced dead at 4.40pm – poignantly in a post from his champion, the US president, on Truth Social – the wave of profound shock was breaking over both sides of the US’s political divide.
“This is horrific. I am stunned,” said the Republican senator from Texas Ted Cruz, who described Kirk on Twitter/X as a “good friend” since the young activist’s teenage years.
Kirk was unashamedly far to the right of the US political spectrum and had expressed openly bigoted views and engaged in homophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. He recently tweeted: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
He mixed evangelical Christian beliefs with rightwing politics into a combustible brew. During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he claimed that Democrats “stand for everything God hates”, adding: “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”
But mourning for Kirk crossed the political aisle.
Charlie Kirk’s killing is a tragic marker of the indiscriminate nature of political violence, writes Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan. You can read the opinion piece here:
Utah Republican senator faces backlash over post condemning Kirk’s killing
The official X account of Mike Lee, a Republican US senator, drew backlash after quickly condemning Wednesday’s killing of influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah – less than three months from when the politician initially responded to the shootings of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers by boosting misinformation about that case.
A post from Lee, who joined the Senate in 2011, denounced Kirk’s murder as “a cowardly act of violence” while hailing the Turning Point USA executive director as an “American patriot” and “inspiration to countless young people”. His post also solicited prayers for the 31-year-old Kirk’s widow, Erika, and their children.
“The terrorists will not win,” Lee said shortly after Kirk’s death while speaking at an outdoors gathering on the campus of Utah Valley University had been confirmed. “Charlie will.”
While some of the platform’s users replied positively to the post, many others immediately alluded to how Lee focused on advancing conspiracy theories in the aftermath of the 14 June shootings that killed Minnesota’s house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, while wounding state senator John Hoffman – her fellow Democrat – as well as his wife, Yvette.
“This is what happens,” Lee wrote in an X post, “When Marxists don’t get their way.” Attached to the post was a picture of the suspect charged in the shooting, Vance Boelter, evidently wearing a latex face mask.
There was no evidence Boelter is a Marxist. Friends have told local media he was right-leaning. And while Minnesota voters don’t list party affiliation, Boelter was registered as a Republican in Oklahoma in 2004.
Separately, under another picture of Boelter, Lee wrote, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” which appeared to be a reference to Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election won by Donald Trump.
Lee’s allusion to Walz came as conservative influencers misleadingly suggested an alliance between the governor and Boelter. Walz’s Democratic predecessor, Mark Dayton, appointed Boelter in 2016 to a 60-member voluntary advisory board. Boelter’s appointment was renewed in 2019 by Walz, who did not know him.
‘Despicable’: Republicans and Democrats condemn violence after Charlie Kirk killing
Chris Stein
The killing of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college on Wednesday afternoon prompted outrage from Democrats and Republicans over the latest act of political violence in the United States, with Donald Trump lamenting the loss of a key ally.
“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” the US president posted on his Truth Social platform.
The president ordered flags to be lowered to half mast to honor Kirk, who was prominent in Trump’s make America great again (Maga) movement.
Trump, who survived an assassination attempt while campaigning in July 2024, also blamed the violence on the “radical left [who] have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis” in an evening video address. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country,” he said.
The identity and motives of the shooter, who was not in custody early Wednesday evening, are not yet known.
JD Vance called Kirk “a genuinely good guy and a young father” and tweeted prayers.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said he was “heartbroken and outrages [sic] by the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” calling the 31-year-old “an incredible husband and father and a great American”.
Former vice-president Kamala Harris said she was “deeply disturbed” by the shooting of Kirk, who organized against her presidential campaign last year.
Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has described the death of Charlie Kirk as “the result of the international hate campaign waged by the progressive-liberal left”.
In a post on X, Orbán wrote:
Charlie Kirk’s death is the result of the international hate campaign waged by the progressive-liberal left.
This is what led to the attacks on [Slovak prime minister] Robert Fico, on [Czech former premier] Andrej Babiš, and now on Charlie Kirk. We must stop the hatred! We must stop the hate-mongering left!
