An urgent hunt continued on Thursday for the shooter who killed rightwing activist Charlie Kirk at an event in Utah the day before, as the authorities reported they believe they had found the weapon used.
Robert Bohls, the special agent in charge of the FBI Salt Lake field office, said early on Thursday at a press conference that officials have recovered a “high-powered bolt action rifle” they believe to be the weapon used when Kirk was shot from long range while addressing a gathering at Utah Valley University in Orem on Wednesday afternoon.
“A rifle was recovered in a wooded area where the shooter had fled” and the FBI laboratory will be “analyzing this weapon”, Coles said.
He added that investigators have also collected “footwear, impression, a palm print and forearm imprints for analysis”.
Kirk, 31, was a provocateur and close ally of Donald Trump and a divisive figure who drove youth recruitment to the US president’s Make American Great Again (Maga) movement as a co-founder of the Turning Point USA rightwing organization.
His killing drew bipartisan condemnation of the rise in political violence in the US. On Thursday morning, Trump attended an event at the Pentagon commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US and announced that he will award the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Kirk. Commemorations also took place in New York, where the first passenger jets hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists hit the World Trade Center that morning in 2001.
On Wednesday, two suspects in the Kirk shooting were taken into custody, but subsequently released. The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, called it a “political assassination”, despite the motive and identity of the shooter remaining unclear.
Beau Mason, the commissioner of Utah’s department of public safety, said investigators were reviewing security camera images of the suspect, who wore dark clothing and possibly fired “a longer distance shot” from a roof.
Mason on Thursday asked the public to be “patient” as law enforcement continue to search for the suspect.
Related: Charlie Kirk’s death shows political violence is now a feature of US life
The previous evening, hours after Kirk had been declared dead not long after a single shot rang out on campus and he was hit in the neck, Trump spoke in a video message from the Oval Office. He vowed that his administration would track down the suspect, in a highly partisan and subjective address in which he said that there had never been anyone so respected by youth as Kirk, even though Kirk was a highly polarizing political activist known for his outspoken bigotry.
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said.
Video footage posted online showed Kirk being questioned by an audience member about gun violence in the moments before he was shot.
Video footage shows students scrambling to run from the sound of gunfire. Kirk was transported to a nearby hospital, where he later died, authorities said. Local officials said the shooting was “believed to be a targeted attack” by a shooter from the roof of a building.
Kirk was a strong voice for the second amendment and opposed gun control in the US, saying at an event in 2023 that a few gun deaths every year were an acceptable price to pay for the right to own guns.
On Wednesday night, the campus of 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 were holding a vigil – one of several taking place that evening across the region – at the hospital’s entrance.
The mourners draped the hospital sign in American flags and surrounded its base with a thicket of candles and homemade signs, including “Peacemakers wanted” and “we love you Charlie Kirk”. When the hospital’s lawn sprinklers abruptly turned on, gatherers smothered them with grocery bags and cut-off plastic bottles to keep the memorial dry.
CJ Sowers, 33, and Ammon Paxton, 19, were in the crowd for Kirk’s speech, and said they watched the shooting unfold.
Paxton said he was right in front of Kirk, and watched his body go limp. “Charlie Kirk was a major role model and hero for me,” said Paxton, who spoke with a red Make America Great Again cap folded in his hand. “One of our greatest heroes is dead.”
Greg Cronin, a faculty member at UVU, said he had stood on the street corner, with a flag in hand, for the past seven hours. He said he was working in the building next to where Kirk was speaking and watched students flood through its halls after the shooting. Cronin said he hoped the shooting could bring people together in dialogue instead of further political division.
“We won’t minimize actions like this around the world, ever,” Cronin said. “But we can minimize the impact that they are allowed to have.”
The US president ordered flags to be lowered to half mast to honour him.
“This is a dark day for our state. It’s a tragic day for our nation,” Cox, a Republican, said at a press conference, appealing for an end to the political violence.
Kirk’s appearances on podcasts and across social media brought him fame for many on the hard right and notoriety elsewhere for his bigotry. Kirk frequently attacked the mainstream media and engaged with culture-war issues around race, gender and immigration, often in a provocative style.
The event in Utah on Wednesday was the first in his “American Comeback Tour” at universities around the country. He often used such events, which typically drew large crowds of students, to invite attendees to debate him live.
Experts have warned his death marks a watershed moment, with fears it could inflame an already fractured country and inspire more unrest.
Kirk expressed openly bigoted views and was an unabashed homophobe and Islamophobe. As recently as Tuesday of this week he tweeted: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
His evangelical Christian beliefs were intertwined with his politics. He argued that there is no true separation of church and state and warned of a “spiritual battle” pitting the west against wokeism, Marxism and Islam.