Police arrested two men at a highway rest stop in rural Maryland yesterday, in the first big break in a hunt for culprits in 10 sniper slayings which have traumatized the suburbs around the nation's capital.
Authorities announced little beyond the arrest of "two individuals" found sleeping in a car.
Government sources identified one of the men as former US soldier John Allen Muhammad, a Gulf War veteran. Media reports said the other was John Lee Malvo, Muhammad's 17-year-old step-son.
"We got our guys," one investigator was quoted as saying by NBC-TV. Washington's WUSA-TV said the men "are considered suspects, according to our sources."
But a spokesman for Montgo-mery County, Maryland, said it was too soon to tie the pair definitively to the sniper killings.
"People are jumping ahead. Give us time to do our job," he said, adding that the two were being questioned in Rockville, Maryland, headquarters of the sniper task force.
A US government source said Muhammad served more than a decade in the armed services and was an Army mechanic in a combat support unit.
"He was not a member of the elite ranger battalion at Fort Lewis [near Tacoma, Washington state] and would not have received any sniper training such as that given to special forces troops," the official told Reuters.
The shootings, which began on Oct 2, terrorized the usually tranquil Washington, DC, suburbs.
The sniper also critically wounded three people, including a 13-year-old boy. A Tarot "Death" Card was left at the scene of the shooting of the boy.
Maryland State Police spokesman Major Greg Shipley said that a passing motorist had alerted authorities after noticing two men sleeping in a car that matched a description given out a few hours earlier by the task force investigating the seemingly random shootings which felled victims with just one bullet.
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