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Investigators turned on Friday to the search for a motive in the murders of two<\/a> Brown University students and a physics professor in Massachusetts in separate but linked attacks, after the prime suspect was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.<\/p>\n The body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and formerly very briefly a student at Brown, was discovered<\/a> in a New Hampshire storage facility on Thursday night after a five-day manhunt.<\/p>\n Authorities say he was responsible for last Saturday\u2019s mass shooting<\/a> at the university\u2019s engineering building on campus in Providence, Rhode Island, in which two people were killed and nine others wounded.<\/p>\n The suspect then drove 50 miles to Brookline, Massachusetts, and shot dead the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno FG Loureiro<\/a> at his home on Monday night, the FBI said during a press conference that also revealed the existence of a tipster<\/a> named \u201cJohn\u201d, who was key in leading investigators to Neves Valente.<\/p>\n Peter Neronha, attorney general of Rhode Island, said there were still \u201ca lot of unknowns\u201d regarding a motive. \u201cWe don\u2019t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,\u201d he said, referring to the university\u2019s Barus & Holley engineering building where the Brown students<\/a> Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were killed.<\/p>\n Neves Valente had \u201cno current affiliation with the university\u201d, Brown\u2019s president, Christina Paxson, said, but he was enrolled at Brown from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001 as a graduate student studying physics, before leaving.<\/p>\n An autopsy determined that Neves Valente had been dead for two days when his body was found, New Hampshire\u2019s attorney general\u2019s office said Friday<\/p>\n At a later news conference on Thursday in Boston, Leah Foley, US attorney for Massachusetts<\/a>, said Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program between 1995 and 2000 at Instituto Superior T\u00e9cnico, Portugal\u2019s premier engineering university.<\/p>\n Loureiro, who was head of MIT\u2019s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, graduated from the physics program at the Lisbon facility in 2000, according to his biography<\/a>. Neves Valente was terminated from a position at the university the same year, Foley said.<\/p>\n Further details of their connection came in an affidavit<\/a> by special agent Bryce Ferrara of the FBI\u2019s Boston field office violent crimes taskforce. The five-page document revealed that Neves Valente, who became a US permanent resident in 2017, and whose last known address was in Miami, rented a gray Nissan Sentra car with a Florida tag at a Boston car rental agency on 1 December.<\/p>\n Images of the vehicle were captured on numerous surveillance cameras near the Brown campus on various dates between 1 and 12 December, the affidavit states, and it was photographed again on Monday close to Loureiro\u2019s home with a false Maine license plate attached.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a highly dangerous individual capable of extreme violence,\u201d Tom Greco, special agent in charge for the Boston division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), told the press conference.<\/p>\n Neves Valente\u2019s body was found in a storage unit he rented in Salem, New Hampshire, with a bag and two firearms, as well as evidence \u201cthat matches exactly what we see at the scene here in Providence\u201d, Neronha said. There was also a bulletproof vest among the belongings.<\/p>\n The authorities said on Friday that Valente had been \u201cvery strategic\u201d and avoided certain roads with vehicle license plate readers in the Providence area. However, license plate readers ultimately helped investigators find the suspect.<\/p>\n