(Reuters) - Alabama’s attorney general said on Thursday he will take over the investigation into the killing of a black man by a police officer who mistook him as a suspect in a shooting at a shopping mall on Thanksgiving night.

In a letter to Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr, Attorney General Steve Marshall said he made the decision after Carr admitted the presence of potential conflicts and biases between him and other parties in the case.

“While I have no reason to believe that you are actually biased or compromised, I agree that other fair-minded persons might question your neutrality based on the information that you provided in the letter and during our private conversations,” Marshall said in the letter, which was posted on the website of the attorney general.

On Thanksgiving night during Black Friday sales, a police officer in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover shot and killed Emantic “EJ” Bradford, 21, at the Riverchase Galleria, believing him to be the gunman in a shooting at the mall that wounded two people.

Later, police said Bradford was likely not the shooter and that the actual gunman remained at large. A suspect was arrested days later.

Marshall said in his letter that the officer who shot Bradford was either the charging officer or a witness in about 20 unrelated cases. The district attorney’s office could be suspected of trying to protect the officer because his testimony might be important in the other cases, the attorney general said.

Marshall also said the district attorney has acknowledged “personal relationships” with some of the protesters who called for the officer who shot Bradford to be criminally prosecuted. Marshall said that in addition to taking over the investigation into Bradford’s death, he was taking over the investigation of the two people wounded in the mall shooting.

An independent autopsy review by a pathologist commissioned by Bradford’s family found that Bradford had his back to police when he was shot, Ben Crump, an attorney for the family, said last week. The results of an official autopsy have yet to be released.

Police have said that Bradford made a chaotic situation worse by drawing his own handgun, leading an officer to see him as a threat and open fire.

Although police acknowledged that the wrong man had been killed, they said Bradford “may have been involved in some aspect” of precipitating events.