Wade Michael Page, the suspected gunman, who was shot dead. (AP)

Washington, Aug. 6: Seven years before white supremacist Wade Michael Page killed six Sikhs at a Wisconsin gurdwara yesterday, he had turned to music — specifically to punk, metal and oi! — as an outlet for his hate.

As investigators in Oak Creek, a small town of 34,451 people, dig into the obscure past of the gurdwara shooter, a former Hawk missile system repairman in the US army, an April 2010 interview he gave to a blog has surfaced.

That interview sheds some light on the killer’s long suppressed urges and laments that “the value of human life has been degraded by being submissive to tyranny and hypocrisy that we are subjugated to”.

Page, 40, started a hard-core punk band in 2005 appropriately called “End Apathy” and wrote a song titled Self Destruct that typically mirrored his innermost feelings. Yesterday outside a Sikh place of worship, he self-destructed but not before destroying half a dozen innocent lives and placing three more in critical danger.

Details that are emerging about the killer could be the stuff of a movie when there is closure to yesterday’s tragedy. But the film’s script would be the very opposite of Hollywood productions about the “beautiful people” of the 1960s who dodged draft during the Vietnam war or travelled to Zabriskie Point in a Michelangelo Antonioni classic by the same name.

According to accounts that have been pieced together by the authorities and non-government organisations campaigning against hate crimes and for gun control, Page also traversed the US on a motorcycle like the hippies of many decades ago.

He left his native Colorado on a motorbike in 2000, two years after he was forced to leave the army in disgrace, demoted from sergeant to specialist and given a less than honourable discharge. But unlike the radicals of the 1960s who promoted love, Page attended white power concerts in Georgia, North Carolina and West Virginia in addition to his home state of Colorado before starting his own band.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center which runs a hate watch programme, in 2000, “Page attempted to purchase goods from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, then America’s most important hate group”.

Although the killer did not discuss violence in his interview two years ago, he talked “on how I was holding myself back”.

The signs were ominous. Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Program at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said today that “we have been tracking him for more than a decade”.

When the Pentagon released Page’s military record today, there was disbelief that at one point, when he was in the army’s good books, he had been awarded the Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct award, National Defence Service Medal, Humanitarian Service Medal and the Parachutist Badge.

He was initially a sergeant working on missiles, then became a psychological operations specialist, but was eventually demoted before being sent out of the army.

The Southern Poverty Law Center alleged today that dangerous ties existed between white supremacist groups and the US military. Almost a year after Barack Obama became President, however, the army tightened restrictions in late 2009 on its men and women advocating white supremacy.

Photographs of Page recovered from musical events and websites show almost his entire body covered in tattoos. The authorities are now investigating associations between these tattoos and anti-civil rights or neo-Nazi groups and trying to decipher their significance. It was revealed today that he bought the gun used in yesterday’s shootings only 10 days ago.

For many American Sikhs, whose number is estimated at about half a million, yesterday’s killings in Wisconsin represented a nightmarish realisation of their worst fears since September 11, 2001. The first domestic casualty of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was a Sikh petrol pump owner in Arizona who was mistaken for a follower of Osama bin Laden because of his turban.

In Oak Creek itself, leaders of the Sikh congregation which was attacked yesterday had recently met Wisconsin state legislator Josh Zepnick and their county’s district attorney to complain about threats to Sikh-owned businesses in the area.

Zepnick described yesterday’s act of domestic terrorism as “gut wrenching”. In a statement, he said: “It certainly makes you wonder about how just how far this epidemic of gun violence goes, where innocent people’s lives are put at risk in ordinary day-to-day situations. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

Obama and his opponent in the coming presidential election, Mitt Romney, may have swiftly condemned the gurdwara shooting, but it should not come as a surprise to either of them that this was a tragedy waiting to happen.

As recently as April this year, 93 members of the US Congress had written a letter to the department of justice and urged the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin collecting data on hate crimes against Sikhs in America and warned that the community is susceptible to attacks because of their turbans and beards that many people here associate with radical Islam.

“The more information our law enforcement agencies have on violence against Sikh-Americans, the more they can do to help prevent these crimes and bring those who commit them to justice,” Joe Crowley who initiated the letter drive had prophetically stated then. Crowley is co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans.