Kim Hjelmgaard

USA TODAY

A man charged with murder and attempted murder for opening fire in a crowded Kansas City area bar, killing one Indian man and wounding two other men, is being investigated for a possible racially motivated hate crime.

Witnesses said Adam Purinton, 51, used racial slurs before he began shooting Wednesday at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kan.

Purinton is charged with murder and attempted murder in the death of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, 32, and wounding of Alok Madasani, 32. Both men are from India and work for GPS device-maker Garmin, which has a customer service center in Olathe.

Ian Grillot, 24, was also shot and injured as he tried to intervene, the Kansas City Star reported. "We’re all humans, so I just did what was right to do," he said in an interview from his hospital bed.

Police said in a news conference Thursday evening that they were working with the FBI to determine whether the case was a hate crime, but it was too early to draw conclusions.

Garret Bohnen, a bartender at Austins Bar and Grill, told the Star that "from what I understand when (Purinton) was throwing racial slurs at the two gentlemen (Kuchibhotla and Madasani), Ian (Grillot) stood up for them."

Other witnesses told the Star that Purinton yelled "get out of my country" before he opened fire. Purinton fled the scene but was apprehended Thursday morning at an Applebee's restaurant 70 miles away. He is a U.S. Navy veteran.

The Indian government condemned the incident, which led news bulletins in the Asian country as social media users voiced concerns President Trump's immigration policies were fueling intolerance.

"The government should voice out this strongly because our brothers, sisters and our relatives are there," Kuchibhotla's brother Venu Madhav told Reuters Television from the family home near Hyderabad, a major tech hub in southern India.

Kuchibhotla was a systems engineer who worked with Madasani for Garmin. "He was very sharp. A top-of-his-class kind of guy," Rob Larson, a former boss of the two men, told the Star. "His personality was exceptional. He was the kind of employee every manager would want."

Sushma Swaraj, the Indian minister of external affairs, said she was shocked at the shooting, and that Navtej Sarna, the Indian ambassador to the U.S., told her that two embassy officials had "rushed" to Kansas.

The FBI reported 5,818 hate crime incidents involving 7,121 victims in the U.S. in 2015, the period for which the latest data were available. Of those victims, 59% were targeted, the FBI said, because of a "race/ethnicity/ancestry bias." Hate crimes specifically targeting Muslims rose 67% for the period.

India is a majority-Hindu country, but Islam is the second-largest religion, with about 15% of its 1.3 billion nationals adherents of the faith.

A separate study released this week showed that hate groups collected more "likes" to tweets and comments on social media in 2016 than in any other year since 2008 and that this sentiment has largely been focused against immigrants and Muslims.

Hate groups explode on social media

Researchers at The Southern Poverty Law Center have meanwhile attributed a tripling in the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in the U.S. — from 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016 — to anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric used by Trump. The civil rights organization described Trump's language as "incendiary."

"Don't be shocked! Be angry! Trump is spreading hate. This is a hate crime! RIP #SrinivasKuchibhotla," Siddharth, a well-known Indian actor, tweeted Friday.