Who is National Guard shooting suspect Rahmanullah Lakanwal?

By Kaanita Iyer, CNN

(CNN) — The Afghan man who allegedly shot two National Guard members in Washington, DC, last week went from being a US partner in Afghanistan to spending the last few years in Washington state with his family, where, according to reports and sources who spoke to CNN, he had a hard time assimilating and dealt with lingering PTSD.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal worked with the CIA for over a decade in Afghanistan before the US military withdrew from the country. That work with US forces in Afghanistan led him to come to the US in 2021.

The devastating attack near the White House last week left one National Guard member dead and another in critical condition. Lakanwal was wounded during the shooting and taken to the hospital, authorities said. His condition is unknown.

He faces at least one first-degree murder charge, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, told Fox News on Friday, adding, “There are certainly many more charges to come.”

As investigators work to establish a motive for the shooting, they have been piecing together details about Lakanwal’s life. The information that has emerged is largely related to the Afghan national’s interactions with the immigration process. Trump administration officials have criticized the Biden administration in the wake of the shooting, saying Lakanwal was not sufficiently vetted before entering the US.

Authorities have also learned in interviews with the suspect’s family that Lakanwal may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, multiple law enforcement officials familiar with the case told CNN.

According to the sources, family members told authorities that the PTSD stemmed from the fighting Lakanwal did in Afghanistan, where he fought in a CIA-sponsored-and-trained unit of the Afghan special forces known as a Zero Unit.

Suspect struggled to assimilate

Lakanwal appeared to have been unraveling for years, unable to hold a job and flipping between long, lightless stretches of isolation and taking sudden weekslong cross-country drives, emails obtained by The Associated Press indicate. His behavior deteriorated so sharply that a community advocate reached out to a refugee organization for help, fearing he was becoming suicidal.

The emails reveal mounting warnings about the asylum-seeker, whose erratic conduct raised alarms long before the attack that jolted the nation’s capital on Wednesday, the eve of Thanksgiving.

The previously unreported concerns offer the clearest picture yet of how he was struggling in his new life in the United States after arriving through Operation Allies Welcome, a program that evacuated and resettled tens of thousands of vulnerable Afghans after the American withdrawal. Many had worked alongside US troops and diplomats.

Lakanwal lived in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five children, according to the Department of Homeland Security. A neighbor, who requested to remain anonymous to protect his privacy, told CNN his two nephews lived with him as well.

A community member shared with AP emails that had been sent to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a nonprofit group that provides services to refugees.

“Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father and provider since March of last year, 03/2023. He quit his job that month, and his behavior has changed greatly,” the person wrote in a January 2024 email.

The emails AP obtained described a man who was unable to hold a steady job or commit to his English courses while he alternated between “periods of dark isolation and reckless travel.” Sometimes, he spent weeks in his “darkened room, not speaking to anyone, not even his wife or older kids.” At one point in 2023, the family faced eviction after months of not paying rent.

The neighbor who spoke with CNN said that to his knowledge, Lakanwal was unemployed and had been looking for a job.

Lakanwal’s work history in the US is not entirely clear, but Amazon confirms that a person with the suspect’s name was an independent contractor with the company for one month this summer, working for its Flex delivery service.

A couple of times, when Lakanwal’s wife left him with the kids for a week to travel to visit relatives, the children would not be bathed, their clothes would not be changed, and they would not eat well, the emails AP obtained show. Their school raised concerns about the situation.

But then, there were “interim” weeks where Lakanwal would try to make amends and “do the right things,” according to an email, reengaging with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services as was mandated by the terms of his entry into the US.

“But that has quickly evolved into ‘manic’ episodes for one or two weeks at a time, where he will take off in the family car, and drive nonstop,” the email outlined. Once, he went to Chicago, and another time, to Arizona.

Pirro said last week that Lakanwal drove across the country from Bellingham, which is about 80 miles north of Seattle, to the nation’s capital.

The community member, in an interview with AP, spoke of becoming worried that Lakanwal was so depressed that he would end up harming himself. But they did not see any indication that Lakanwal would commit violence against another person.

When the community member saw on the news that Lakanwal was named as the suspect in the attack, they told the AP they were stunned, unable to square the violence with the memory of seeing Lakanwal play with his young sons. The person spoke with AP on the condition of anonymity to share undisclosed details while cooperating with the FBI in its investigation.

Lakanwal’s neighbor told CNN he knew him as a “simple and nice guy,” who attended a local mosque, but added that the suspect had “disappeared” and had not gone to the mosque in over two weeks.

“He was not coming … somebody said he’s sick, someone else said he went somewhere,” the neighbor said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that officials “believe he was radicalized since he’s been here in this country.” She did not provide details on what that may have entailed.

“We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state, and we’re going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members,” Noem said.

‘He was clean on all checks’

Lakanwal began working with the CIA around 2011, a senior US official told CNN. At the time, the CIA would have vetted him through a variety of databases, including the National Counterterrorism Center’s, to see whether he had any known ties to terrorist groups, the official said.

NCTC would have vetted him again for any ties to terrorism before he was allowed into the US in 2021 as part of Operation Allies Welcome. Lakanwal was part of a prioritized group evacuated from Kabul after the Afghan capital fell to the Taliban. Due to his work for the US, including serving in an elite Afghan counterterrorism unit, Lakanwal was considered to be at risk of retribution once the Taliban took control of Afghanistan.

He was clean then as well, and did not show any ties to terror organizations, per the senior US official.

“In terms of vetting, nothing came up,” according to the official. “He was clean on all checks.”

But NCTC Director Joe Kent on Friday said in a post on X that while Lakanwal was vetted to work with the US government in Afghanistan, he was “NOT vetted for his suitability to come to America and live among us as a neighbor, integrate into our communities, or eventually become an American citizen.”

Once Lakanwal was evacuated, he went through multiple layers of vetting by multiple US government agencies, sources told CNN — first in a Middle Eastern country, according to one source familiar with the matter, and then regularly over the past few years while he was residing in the US.

A Justice Department audit, the results of which were released in June, found no systemic breakdowns in the process established to screen and vet Afghan evacuees.

But the audit acknowledged that “the normal processes required to determine whether individuals posed a threat to national security and public safety were overtaken by the need to immediately evacuate and protect the lives of Afghans, increasing the potential that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation.”

Lakanwal would have also been vetted after he applied for asylum in 2024. It was granted in April, during the Trump administration. Noem on Sunday told NBC, “The vetting process all happened under (former President) Joe Biden’s administration.”

CNN’s John Miller, Zachary Cohen, Evan Perez, Kristen Holmes, Lex Harvey, Chelsea Bailey, Yahya Abou-Ghazala, Andy Rose, Sarah Moon and Alejandra Jaramillo contributed to this report.

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