Atlanta shootings suspect, who was charged on Wednesday with murdering eight people in spas around the US city of Atlanta in three different incidents was described as a sex addict by captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County.

The suspect identified as Robert Aaron Long has denied a racist motive for Tuesday’s attacks. However, the police are yet to identify the reason behind the shooting rampage. Six of the eight victims were women of Asian origin.

“The suspect did take responsibility for the shootings,” Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Office told a news conference.

Long, who is white, “does claim it was not racially motivated,” Baker added, but stressed that it was “still early” in the investigation.

The suspect “apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction,” Baker said.

Long told police he had frequented massage parlors in the past and launched the attacks as a form of vengeance against “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”

While a probe is ongoing into the motive, the attacks thrust the spotlight onto a spike in violence targeting Asian-Americans — fueled during the COVID-19 pandemic, activists believe, by talk of the “Chinese virus” by former president Donald Trump and others.

“Racially motivated violence must be called out for exactly what it is,” Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland — who is half-Korean — said Wednesday.

“We must stop making excuses or rebranding it as economic anxiety or sexual addiction.”

The spotlight has also been thrust on the police leading the investigation — particularly on Captain Baker’s remarks that the alleged shooter had had a “bad day”.

Tuesday’s rampage began with an attack at Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, an Atlanta suburb, where four of the victims were killed and a man was wounded.

Police said four women were subsequently killed in attacks on two neighboring spas in the northeast of Atlanta.

In the initial attack, the county sheriff’s department has charged Long with four counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.

ALSO READ | Everything to know about the Atlanta massage parlor shooting suspect

He was also charged with four counts of murder relating to the double Atlanta attack, the city’s police department announced.

Authorities arrested Long after tracking his phone following a brief pursuit about 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Atlanta, officials said.

The state of Georgia, of which Atlanta is the capital, is home to nearly 500,000 people of Asian origin, or just over four percent of its population, according to the Asian American Advocacy Fund.