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US prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting dead UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.<\/p>\n
Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement on Tuesday that she had directed federal prosecutors to seek the penalty for the “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination”.<\/p>\n
Mr Thompson was shot dead outside a hotel in New York on 4 December. Police arrested Mr Mangione, 26, days later in Pennsylvania after a nationwide manhunt.<\/p>\n
He has pleaded not guilty to state charges, and has yet to enter a plea for separate federal charges. He is currently awaiting trial in a New York prison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In the press release, Bondi said Mr Thompson’s murder “was an act of political violence” and that it “may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons” nearby.<\/p>\n
Investigators say Mr Mangione was motivated to kill Mr Thompson, 50, because of anger with US healthcare insurance companies.<\/p>\n
Mr Mangione is facing 11 state criminal counts in New York, including first-degree murder and murder as a crime of terrorism.<\/p>\n
If convicted of all the counts, he would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.<\/p>\n
But federal prosecutors have also separately charged Mr Mangione for using a firearm to commit murder and interstate stalking resulting in death. These charges make him eligible for the death penalty.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors have said the federal and state cases will move forward parallel with one another.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Mr Mangione is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) Brooklyn.<\/p>\n
New York prosecutors have already shared some evidence in their case against him, including a positive match of his fingerprints with those discovered at the crime scene. <\/p>\n
According to New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Mr Mangione arrived in New York City on 24 November and stayed in a Manhattan hostel using a fake ID for 10 days before carrying out the attack against Mr Thompson.<\/p>\n
The healthcare boss was shot in the back by a masked assailant on 4 December as he was walking into a hotel where the company he led was holding an investors’ meeting.<\/p>\n
A nationwide search led police to Mr Mangione five days later at a McDonald’s hundreds of miles away in Altoona, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
Police said that when they found Mr Mangione, he was in possession of a ghost gun – a gun assembled from untraceable parts – a fake ID, a passport and a handwritten document indicating “motivation and mindset”.<\/p>\n
Mr Thompson’s killing ignited a wide debate about how the US healthcare system operates.<\/p>\n
Many Americans, who pay more for healthcare than people in any other country, expressed anger over what they see as unfair treatment by insurance firms.<\/p>\n
US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in December that the rhetoric on social media in the wake of the killing was “extraordinarily alarming”.<\/p>\n
“It speaks of what is really bubbling here in this country, and unfortunately we see that manifested in violence, the domestic violent extremism that exists,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n