Eco-terrorist shot dead at Discovery Channel HQ after taking hostages

Police have shot dead a gunman today after he took hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, U.S. It’s thought that the gunman named as James Jay Lee was angry because his idea for a television show was rejected.

Lee had entered the building via the main entrance at around 1pm brandishing a gun as well as wearing what looked like metallic canisters strapped to his front and back, bomb technicians were rushed to the scene in Silver Springs, Maryland, which is a suburb of Washington, DC. At the time there were around 1,900 people working in the building, including children and babies who were in the company’s daycare facility, with most of the workers and the infants able to escape safely.

Before he was shot police officers were negotiating with Lee and watching him on CCTV, however the three hostages he had decided not to wait and made a run for it the two Discovery employees and a security guard as they did officers moved in on Lee as they did they thought they heard a pop which could have been one of his bombs. Police then stepped out from behind a wall and shot him dead, ending the siege after around four hours of negotiations.

According to police they also found and detonated four more devices at a home where Lee had been staying after the owner alerted authorities. Speaking about the situation Montgomery County Police Chief Thomas Manger said: “For most of the time, the hostages were laying on the ground, and he didn’t engage them much other than saying on the phone, ‘I don’t care about these people, I believe he was not intending to come out of there alive. … He told us many times over the course of hours that he was ready to die.”

It wasn’t the first time Lee had been in trouble at the Discovery HQ he had previously been arrested in 2008 after a protest there where he threw thousands of dollars in the air.

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