Pressure is mounting on Donald Trump to condemn a racist anti-Muslim attack that left two men stabbed to death on Friday.
Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche, 23, of Southeast Portland and Ricky John Best, 53, of Happy Valley, Oregon were killed after intervening to stop an Islamophobic rant against two young women.
The pair have been described as heroes by the FBI and Portland's mayor but President Trump has not commented, despite tweeting 10 times about other topics on Sunday.
Police identified the assailant, who was arrested soon after the Friday afternoon attack, as Jeremy Joseph Christian of Portland, a 35-year-old convicted felon.
Christian started shouting ethnic and religious slurs, apparently at the two young women, one of whom wore a Muslim head-covering, the Portland Police Department said in a statement.
A senior researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a blog post, said Christian's Facebook page showed he held 'some racist and other extremist beliefs'.
The attack unfolded hours before the start of Ramadan, Islam's holy month, when most of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims observe a daily religious fast.
'It's too early to say whether last night's violence was an act of domestic terrorism or a federal hate crime,' said Loren Cannon, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Oregon.
A veteran American journalist Dan Rather led calls for Trump to condemn the attack, saying although the case 'may not neatly fit into a narrative you pushed on the campaign trail and that has followed you into the White House', the men were 'not killed by an undocumented immigrant or a "radical Islamic terrorist"'.
'This 'extremism' may be of a different type than gets most of your attention, or even the attention in the press. But that doesn't make it any less serious, or deadly,' he wrote on social media.
Christian was booked on two counts of aggravated murder and charges of attempted murder, intimidation and being a felon in possession of a restricted weapon, and was ordered held without bail.
The women, who had left the train before officers arrived, were later in contact with authorities, according to police, who have not released their identities.
Dyjuana Hudson, the mother of one of them, told The Oregonian newspaper her 16-year-old daughter, who is black, boarded the train with a Muslim friend, also a teenager, who was wearing a hijab.
The attacker approached the girls while screaming at them, Hudson told the newspaper, relaying an account her daughter had given her. 'He was saying that Muslims should die,' Hudson said.
On Friday, police said detectives wanted to speak to the two women. A detective later took a statement from her family, Hudson told the paper. She could not be reached for comment.
Police declined to release details of Christian's criminal history, but the newspaper reported he had been convicted of robbery, kidnapping and weapon charges, citing court records. It was not immediately clear if he had obtained an attorney.
The suspect had no known affiliation with a criminal gang member nor any mental health history, police said.
In a statement, the Council on American-Islamic Relations blamed an increase in anti-Muslim incidents in part on President Donald Trump's focus on militant Islamist groups and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The administration has said that while it strongly opposes Islamist militants, it has no quarrel with Islam.
'There is too much hatred in the world right now and far too much violence. Our current political climate allows far too much room for those who spread bigotry,' Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler told a news conference.
Additional reporting by Reuters.
