Marilou Danley’s comments came hours before police suggested Stephen Paddock had been living “a secret life”.

They said he may have been planning to escape instead of shooting himself dead, but did not give further details.

It is not yet known why he opened fire on an open air concert, committing the worst shooting in modern US history.

Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said in a press conference on Wednesday:

• Police had found more explosives in Paddock’s car at the hotel, along with about 1,600 rounds of ammunition
• Paddock had been gambling just hours before he began shooting
• He had booked into an apartment at the high-rise Ogden in downtown Las Vegas a week earlier during a different open air festival where major acts like Muse and Lorde were due to play

But he said Paddock’s motivations and whether there were any possible accomplices remained a mystery. The FBI has said so far no link to terrorism had been found.

“We don’t understand it yet,” Sheriff Lombardo told reporters, but questioned whether he could have accomplished his plan by himself.

“You’ve got to make the assumption he had to have some help at some point,” he said.

Ms Danley, who spoke to the FBI on Wednesday after travelling back voluntarily from a holiday in the Philippines, expressed shock at the “horrible unspeakable acts of violence” Paddock had committed.

Paddock “never said anything to me or took any action” which she understood as a warning of what was to come, she said in a statement read by her lawyer.

Ms Danley added: “I loved him and hoped for a quiet future together.”

US authorities named Ms Danley a “person of interest” in their investigation and said they had made contact with her shortly after the shooting.

Ms Danley voluntarily flew back to Los Angeles from the Philippines on Tuesday night to speak to the FBI, just over two weeks after Paddock had surprised her with a “cheap ticket” to enable her to visit her family.

While there, he wired her $100,000 (£75,400), explaining it was to buy a house.

“I was grateful, but honestly I was worried it was a way for him to break up with me,” she said. “It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone.”

Her sisters earlier told Australian outlet 7News that Ms Danley “was sent away… so that she will not be there to interfere with what he’s planning”.

Paddock checked into a suite in the Mandalay Bay Hotel on 28 September, reportedly using some of Ms Danley’s identity documents.

US President Donald Trump, who visited the city on Wednesday, said “America is truly a nation in mourning” in the wake of the mass killings.

More than 500 people were injured in the attack.

President Trump praised the emergency services who battled to save as many as they could, despite the danger to themselves.

“When the worst of humanity strikes – and strike it did – the best of humanity responds,” he said as he applauded injured officers.

“In the depths of horror, we will always find hope in the men and women who risk their lives for ours,” he added.

Mr Trump said he was in the “company of heroes” after visiting the first responders.

“Words cannot describe the bravery that the whole world witnessed on Sunday night,” he said. “Americans defied death and hatred with love and with courage.”

Will the attack prompt more demand for gun controls?

The shooting has prompted calls for reform to US gun laws.

But Mr Trump – who has been backed by the National Rifle Association, and spoke often of protecting gun rights during his campaign – has tried to steer clear of leaning too far either way.

After visiting Puerto Rico on Tuesday, he said “perhaps that [time] will come” for a debate.

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Two cameras in the hallway and one in the peephole allowed him to see if “law enforcement or security” were approaching, police said.

Officers are still trying to determine why Paddock, 64, opened fire on a concert from the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

However, they do know there was a high degree of planning.

The authorities in Las Vegas revised the death toll down from 59 on Tuesday evening, saying that one of the bodies was that of the gunman.

Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters: “This individual was pre-meditated. Obviously pre-meditated, the fact that he had the type of weaponry and the amount of weaponry in that room.

“It was pre-planned extensively and I’m pretty sure he evaluated everything he did in his actions.”

Undersheriff Kevin McMahill suggested the attack may have stopped when Paddock was disturbed, shooting a security guard.

The shooting – the worst in modern US history – has sparked debate over US gun laws, but President Donald Trump has said the discussion over what, if anything, needs to be done was “not for now”.

He earlier described Paddock as “a sick man, a demented man”.

But a senior US homeland security official, speaking on condition of anonymity to news agency Reuters, said there was “no evidence” of “mental illness or brain damage”.

Nor have police found links to any foreign or domestic terrorist organisations.

Paddock, who appears to have killed himself before police stormed his hotel room, had no criminal record and was not known to police.

However, police found 23 guns in Paddock’s hotel room, as well as firearms and explosives at his home. In total, across three locations, 47 firearms have been recovered, officials said.

Photos from the hotel room of guns used in the attack have been obtained by Boston 25 News.

Police still consider the woman thought to have been his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, “a person of interest”, he said, adding they were “in conversation”.

Ms Danley had been in the Philippines, but flew out of the country, the Philippine immigration bureau spokeswoman told reporters and has now arrived in Los Angeles.

The shooting has prompted calls for reform to US gun laws.

But Mr Trump – who has been backed by the National Rifle Association, and spoke often of protecting the Second Amendment during his campaign – has tried to steer clear of leaning too far either way.

After visiting Puerto Rico on Tuesday, he said “perhaps that [time] will come” for a debate.

Earlier, he had said: “We’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.”

Mr Trump, whose position on gun control has changed over the years, gave no further detail.

Mr Trump also declined to call the attack domestic terrorism.

What do we know of the gunman?

Paddock, a former accountant with a big gambling habit, lived in a community of senior citizens in the small town of Mesquite, north-east of Las Vegas.

He reportedly shared his house there with Marilou Danley. Initially police had said she was in Japan rather than the Philippines and discounted her involvement.

Nineteen firearms, some explosives and several thousand rounds of ammunition with electronic devices were found at the property.

Officers also found ammonium nitrate in Paddock’s car. The chemical compound used in fertilisers can be a component of bombs such as that deployed in the 1995 Oklahoma City attack.

David Famiglietti of the New Frontier Armory told the BBC that Paddock had purchased firearms at his store in North Las Vegas in the spring of this year, meeting all state and federal requirements, including an FBI background check.

However, the shotgun and rifle Paddock bought would not have been “capable of what we’ve seen and heard in the video without modification”, Mr Famiglietti said.

The fast shooting rate audible in recordings of Sunday night’s attack indicates that Paddock may have modified his guns with legal accessories to make them fire at speeds approaching those of automatic weapons.

Despite the large cache of weapons found in the killer’s home, his brother, Eric, is struggling to accept that he acted in this way. He said he was “in shock, horrified, completely dumbfounded”.

So-called Islamic State claimed on Monday to be behind the attack, saying Paddock had converted to Islam some months ago. But the group provided no evidence for this and has made unsubstantiated claims in the past.

The FBI said it had found “no connection to an international terrorist organisation”.

–

Source: BBC

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They have also threatened to abandon the classrooms and seek legal redress against government and the Ghana Education Service (GES) should they fail to meet their demand within the stipulated period.

Addressing a news conference in Tamale on Tuesday, the group’s spokesperson Basharu Bob, said the situation has brought untold hardship to them and their families.

He noted the action by government and the GES violates the country’s labour laws by not informing them and giving reasons before the action was taken since February, 2014.

He dispelled the believe that they were caught in a recent exercise to flash out ghost names on government pay roll and regretted that teachers who were at post were affected by the action.

The spokesperson accused authorities of deliberately targeting and victimizing them in attempt to cover the real ghost on government pay roll and challenged them to fish them out but to demoralize them.

According to him, a total of 620 teachers in the region have not received their salaries since February this year without any justification and therefore, appealed to the authorities to compel the Controller and Accountant Generals Department (CAGD) to fast track the process of inputting their salaries.

Mr. Bob warned government and the GES not to take them for granted and appealed to his colleagues to stay calm whiles efforts are made to address the problem.

By: Mashoud Kombat/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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The problem, he said, has compounded the educational problems in the area.

He said despite some empty classrooms, there were over 1,000 excess teachers in the Tamale Metropolis and the Sagnarigu district and noted that such excess teachers had created vacant classrooms in many schools .

He therefore revealed the Metroplis’  intention of redeploying the excess teachers to fill the classrooms.

Speaking on the sidelines of a regional policy dialogue organised by ActionAid Ghana (AAG), an advocacy non-governmental organization operating in the country,Mr Apanga said the Tamale Metropolis had 517 excess teachers while the Sagnarigu district had 608 excess teachers and that the Business Secondary School (BISCO) alone had 13 excess teachers and were being red

The forum was meant to identify weaknesses in development projects and to plan on how to chart a new course or paradigm that would produce results for the people especially the poor and the disadvantaged in society.

He said the GES in the region had embarked on a rationalisation exercise to get rid of the extra teachers that were in the cities especially the Tamale Metro and the Sagnarigu district and that, those excess teachers would be transferred to deprived and underserved communities while others would be posted to the 404 schools that were without teachers.

When asked about his dual role as Northern and Upper East Regional director, Mr Apanga explained that he was transferred from the Upper East to the Northern Region in September 2012 and had since been acting for the Upper East because no one had taken over that position.

Mr Sumaila Abdul-Rahaman, Country Director of AAG observed that the consistent failures on various policies in the country was because of their over dependence on inflows from external sources stressing that many Assemblies’ medium terms have failed because of such problems.

He said it was time Assemblies in Ghana borrowed laudable policies from Burkina Faso to solve local problems saying, “In Burkina Faso, dug outs that are created as a result of road constructions are used to construct dams for irrigation”.

The Country Director explained that such dams were used to produce vegetables such as tomatoes, onions and livestock and exported to Ghana stressing that Ghana could have done better if its arable lands and the conducive weather conditions were utilized judiciously.

Mr Abdul-Rahaman said his areas of priority as a new director of AAG would be in food security, women rights and women smallholder farmers to promote their access to lands to produce food to liberate them economically.

Alhaji Abdul-Basit Fuseini, Deputy Northern Regional Minister underscored the importance of the regional policy dialogue and indicated that the region had huge potentials but that those potentials had been derailed by negative publicities.

He urged the people in the region to think collectively to find solutions that would tackle developmental and educational problems confronting the area noting that the region lost its position as the enviable producer of rice.

The Northern Regional Monitoring and Evaluation Officer of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Mr Peter Claver Anyeember, decried the low ratio of extension officers in the region stressing that agriculture was hugely affected because new methods of farming could not be properly transferred to farmers.

He said in 2014, there were estimated 324,551 farmers in the region with only 237 extension officers explaining that each district was supposed to have 32 extension officers but in some cases, only two extension officers could be found in a district in the region.

Source: GNA

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