'Bomb robot' kills suspect in shooting deaths of Dallas police

The horrifying details of Thursday night's mass shooting of five law enforcement officers in Dallas during an otherwise peaceful demonstration includes a startling revelation: Police apparently equipped their bomb-disposal robot with a bomb that it then detonated to kill the suspect. According to Dallas PD Police Chief David Brown, police cornered one suspect, who has yet to be identified, in El Centro College and, after hours of negotiation and an exchange of gunfire, they brought in a "bomb robot." "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was ... The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb," he said. This statement is remarkable on a number of levels. Bomb detection and disarming robots are not a new phenomenon, but they are almost exclusively used to find ordinances and, if possible, detonate them far away from people.