Two victims, cousins from Somalia, owned the store. The third, from Oromo, was a customer. Police say they have "a suspected motive.'

With the "cold-blooded" killers of three East African immigrants still on the loose Thursday, Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan appealed to the public -- and the city's Somali community -- for help in solving a crime that has shaken a city and the relatively quiet Seward neighborhood.

Two of the three victims were Somali, and the third -- a store customer -- was a native of Oromo in East Africa. Police said they believed the suspects are Somali.

The third victim, identified by his mother as Anwar Mohammed, 31, had just finished his shift as a parking attendant in downtown Minneapolis Wednesday night and walked into the store to pick up groceries and a calling card to phone his new wife in Ethiopia. Mohammed's mother, Badria Rashad, said her son was preparing to bring his new wife to Minnesota this spring.

At a morning news conference, originally scheduled to tout the city's marked drop in crime in 2009, Dolan sidestepped the issue of whether the suspects knew the victims.Regarding a motive, he said, "I'm not at this point ruling [a robbery attempt] out, but I'm not saying that we are comfortable saying that at all. We have a suspected motive that we're not going to get into the details on, but we're not sure." Dolan said that although there were two suspects in the store when the shootings occurred, "we don't know that's the total number of suspects. There could be drivers, there could be people outside." Dolan said witnesses in the store were cooperating.

Since 2005, police have been called to the store 12 times. Five calls were for robberies, including a 2007 case reported by Abdifatah Warfa. The busy Seward neighborhood, just south of Interstate 94 and near the hub of the city's booming Somali population, also has been relatively safe. Police records show 56 robberies in 2009 and no homicides

READ FULL STORY: Star Tribune