Al Jazeera America A man has been arrested and charged with fatally shooting three students\u00a0near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus, local police and school officials said.<\/p>\n While police said the shooting on Tuesday evening appears to have been motivated by a long-running parking dispute among neighbors, family members have characterized the shootings as a \u201chate crime\u201d and a civil rights group has called for an investigation into possible anti-Muslim bias. All three of the students were Muslims.<\/p>\n Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, of Chapel Hill, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the incident,\u00a0according to a statement on the school’s alert website<\/a>. He\u00a0is being held at the Durham County Jail,\u00a0and appeared briefly in court Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n Around 5:15 p.m. local time on Tuesday police responded to a report of gunshots. They found three people who were pronounced dead at the scene.\u00a0The victims were named as Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23; his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21; and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19.<\/p>\n “It was execution style, a bullet in every head,” Mohammad Abu-Salha, father of the two sisters, told theCharlotte Observer<\/a>. “This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime. This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt. And they were uncomfortable with him, but they did not know he would go this far.”<\/p>\n
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