The authorities in Utah were still searching early Thursday for the person who killed Charlie Kirk, the charismatic founder of the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist group, after questioning and releasing two people.
No suspects were in custody about 12 hours after Mr. Kirk, a close ally of President Trump, was shot while speaking on a Utah college campus in what the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, and Mr. Trump described as an “assassination.”
The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, posted on social media late Wednesday that “our investigation continues,” reversing his earlier announcement that someone had been apprehended for Mr. Kirk’s killing. Mr. Patel said the person taken into custody had been “released after an interrogation.” Soon after, F.B.I. agents in Utah asked the public for tips.
The person released on Wednesday evening was the second taken into custody by the police and later cleared. Officials said shortly after the shooting that someone had been detained, but investigators later determined that he was not the gunman. Officials said that person, a local political activist, had been charged with obstruction of justice.
Hopes for the fast capture of the person who fatally shot the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah evaporated on Wednesday when Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced that the authorities had released a man he had described as a central subject of a multiagency manhunt.
“The subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement,” Mr. Patel wrote on his X account, adding: “our investigation continues.”
Two hours earlier, Mr. Patel had stoked expectations of a fast end to the search by congratulating state, local and federal officials for taking into custody “the subject for the horrific shooting today.”
The release of the subject capped a day of shock, fear and uncertainty over what officials described as political assassination, committed in broad daylight in front of thousands of people who had come to participate in a discussion with Mr. Kirk, 31, at Utah Valley University.
The backtrack was a source of significant embarrassment for the F.B.I. director on a day when three former F.B.I. agents filed a lawsuit against Mr. Patel that portrayed him as a partisan neophyte more interested in social media, and swag, than in the day-to-day operations of the nation’s flagship law enforcement agency.
That the director of the F.B.I., historically known for careful messaging on fluid investigations — and deferring to local leaders — would personally take the lead in releasing information about the shooting was unusual.
It was even more unusual that he chose to post that information minutes before Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah and officials from the F.B.I. and local law enforcement were scheduled to provide the first on-camera briefing on the shooting.
Moments after Mr. Patel’s post, Beau Mason, the commissioner of Utah’s Department of Public Safety, told reporters that his agency and the F.B.I. would be working together “to find this killer,” suggesting the search was ongoing.
Mr. Cox spoke next, saying that the authorities had “a person of interest in custody,” but also that the police would find whoever had committed the crime.
In response to reporters’ questions about Mr. Patel’s post, the governor repeated his statement that authorities were questioning someone in custody.
Another person who had been taken into custody immediately after the shooting — and seen in videos that circulated widely on social media — was determined not to be the shooter, the authorities said.
About an hour before Donald J. Trump took the oath of office, Charlie Kirk was sitting in the Capitol Rotunda when he glanced down at his iPhone. What the 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality saw caused him to swallow laughter. A reporter for The Daily Beast had posted on X: “‘Charlie Kirk has better seats than every member of Congress. Tells you how little Trump thinks of Congress,’ one GOP lawmaker tells me.” Twenty minutes later, Kirk saw that a Republican senator from Indiana, Jim Banks, had posted a rebuttal of sorts: “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of congress combined to get us to this point today.”
