JERSEY CITY, N.J. • The man and woman who stormed a Jewish market in a deadly shooting in Jersey City clearly targeted the place, the mayor said Wednesday, amid growing fears the bloodshed was an anti-Semitic attack.

New Jersey Attorney General Gurbil Grewal, though, cautioned that the motive for the attack that left six people dead Tuesday was still under investigation. The two assailants were killed along with three people inside the kosher market and a police officer in an hourslong gunbattle and standoff that began at a cemetery.

“As we speak, we are working to learn more about the shooters’ motivations and whether others may be involved,” Grewal said.

The killers were identified as David N. Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50 — both of them also suspects in the slaying of an Uber driver found dead in the trunk of a car in nearby Bayonne over the weekend, Grewal said.

Authorities are investigating potential connections between the attackers and the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, some of whose members are known to rail against whites and Jews, a law enforcement official familiar with the case said. Investigators also are scouring social media postings of at least one of the gunmen in search of a motive, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still going on.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the Hebrew Israelites a black supremacist group.

The shooting in the city of 270,000 people across the Hudson River from New York City began at a graveyard, where Detective Joseph Seals, a 40-year-old member of a unit devoted to taking illegal guns off the street, was gunned down by the assailants, authorities said. The killers then drove a stolen rental van about a mile to the kosher market.

Grewal said that within seconds of pulling up to the market, Anderson got out with a rifle and immediately began shooting, and Graham followed him into the store. He would not say whether Graham had a weapon.

A pipe bomb was found in the attackers’ van, FBI agent Gregory Ehrie said.

Mayor Steven Fulop noted that surveillance video of the van showed the assailants driving slowly through the city’s streets and then stopping outside the grocery, where they calmly got out of their van and promptly opened fire.

“There were multiple other people on the street, so there were many other targets available to them that they bypassed to attack that place, so it was clear that was their target and they intended to harm people inside,” the mayor said of the attackers.

Responders work to clean up the scene of Tuesday’s shooting in Jersey City, N.J.

the associated press