Washington sniper's taunting message to police: I am God

A taunting message on a tarot card, "Dear Policeman, I am God", might be the biggest clue yet in the manhunt for the sniper who killed six people in and around Washington last week, terrorising the entire capital region.

A furious Charles Moose, police chief for Montgomery County, Maryland, where five of the murders took place, refused to confirm the existence of the message, said to be scrawled on the Death card in a tarot pack. The card was found near the school where a 13-year-old pupil was wounded on Monday morning.

But according to several media outlets yesterday, the card was found some 150 yards from the entrance where the boy was struck, with a spent bullet casing. A nearby patch of grass was flattened, suggesting that in contrast to his earlier hit-and-run tactics, the gunman had this time lain in wait for his victim.

As the casing was being checked against the database of firearms evidence, police were pursuing another lead a few miles away in Maryland, five miles south of the District of Columbia border.

Officers closed off a wooded area near two schools while Swat teams searched for a suspicious-looking man – described as white, wearing blue jeans and a blue jacket and carrying a long black bag – seen earlier in the morning.

At the same time, investigators were re-examining a shooting more than three weeks ago, on 14 September, when a liquor store employee in Montgomery County was wounded.

"We are not ruling [the shooting] in, we are not ruling it out," commented an official of the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is handling scientific evidence in the sniper case.

Police Chief Moose, who has found himself at the forefront of one of the biggest crime stories of the year, was livid at the leak of the tarot card discovery. Lashing into the media at a press conference yesterday, he asked: "Who do you want to lead this case, the police or the media? The last I heard, the people of Montgomery County wanted the police to be in charge."

For the moment, though, police seem no closer to cracking the case, despite a reward that has now reached $237,000 (£158,000). More than 1,400 leads have been culled from 7,000 tips left on a special hotline, but 200 investigators assigned to the case have yet to make a breakthrough.

The assumption is that the killer is an accomplished marksman – though police say that with modern technology, it is not hard to shoot accurately from a prone position, even from the 150-yard range indicated by Monday's crime scene.

So far FBI profiling of suspects has produced nothing. The white van seen driving from the scene of one of last Thursday's killings has not been found. Police are not sure what make of weapon fired the .223 calibre bullets that hit the victims.

The 13-year-old boy who was attacked on Monday is said to be "critical but stable" after surgery at a Washington hospital. Many schools in the capital are on "code blue" alert, with students kept inside and most extramural activities cancelled.

School attendance in the affected areas has dropped by a third. Some parents are serving as volunteer guards at crossroads as the panic grows.