The US military has agreed to help hunt for a sniper who has been terrorizing the Washington area.
A senior official said that Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld had agreed to provide military surveillance aircraft and crews to help hunt for the killer whose latest victim was shot dead on Monday while loading her car with shopping bags.
The military is forbidden by law to provide police duties domestically but the defence official said Mr Rumsfeld had agreed to a request to provide the military aid.
He declined to be more specific and stressed that the military would not be directly involved in police work and would be under the supervision of civilian law enforcement.
"We are trying to give as little information as possible to the person on the ground," he said.
But he added that the surveillance aircraft would be manned with military crews and would be brought in from outside the Washington area which includes parts of Maryland and Virginia.
FBI employee Ms Linda Franklin was killed in front of her husband by a single shot to the head late on Monday in the parking lot of a Home Depot hardware store in Falls Church, Virginia, west of Washington.
Police said Ms Franklin, an FBI intelligence analyst, was not involved in the sniper investigation and was therefore considered yet another random victim.
The sniper's random attacks have spread fear in a wide area around Washington since he went on a 15-hour shooting spree on October 2nd and 3rd, killing five people in the suburban Maryland neighborhoods, northwest of the US capital, and one in Washington proper. Two others have been shot dead in the city's southwestern suburbs in Virginia.
The sniper has also wounded two people: a 13-year-old schoolboy in Bowie, Maryland, northeast of Washington, and a woman in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the south. A $500,000 reward is offered for information leading to the sniper's capture.