28 February,2009 10:18 AM IST | | AFP
A man armed with a rifle shot and killed two Chilean students and wounded three others, firing through a window at their home in a Florida beach town, police have said.
The Walton County Sheriff's Office was still trying to determine what prompted Dannie Baker, 60, to leave his house in Miramar Beach in northern Florida early Thursday and shoot the victims.
"We don't know the motives of the attack, we are investigating," said Tammy Godwin, executive assistant to the sheriff. "There were no indicators, no complaints of bad noise or something."
She identified the two students who were killed as Nicolas Corp, 23, and Racine Balbontin, 22. The wounded were Sebastian Arizaga, Francisco Cofre and David Bilbao.
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Bilbao was released from the hospital, but the other two were still undergoing treatment yesterday. Godwin said the attack occurred at around 2:00 am Thursday. She said Baker, who is in custody, did not enter the students' house but shot at them through a window.
Bilbao told his brother that the youths, who were in Florida as part of an educational exchange programme, were sitting around a kitchen table talking and cooking when they were surprised by a blast and the sound of breaking glass.
"My brother thought something had exploded in the oven, and never imagined it was a gunshot until about the third shot when he was hit in the arm," Mario Bilbao told a Chilean radio station.
