Officials said five women and five men were among the dead. (file)
United States of america:
Police were involved in a standoff on Sunday with a man they believe killed 10 people in a mass shooting at a dance club during Lunar New Year celebrations in California.
Witnesses said at least 10 other people were wounded in the mass shooting with the gunman – described by police as Asian – firing indiscriminately at the club in Monterey Park near Los Angeles.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said, “We are using every resource we have to apprehend this suspect in what we believe to be one of the most heinous cases in the county.”
Luna said police responded to an emergency call shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday (0600 GMT Sunday) and found people leaving the compound.
“Unfortunately,” he said, paramedics “pronounced 10 of the victims dead at the scene.”
Officials said five women and five men were among the dead, without giving ages or names.
Luna said at least 10 people were injured, some of them in serious condition.
nearby event
Luna also described a second incident in nearby Alhambra about 20 minutes later, in which an Asian man with a gun walked into a dance studio, but was disarmed. The man fled and no one was injured.
The Alhambra is about two miles north of Monterey Park. Luna said investigators are looking into whether the incidents are connected.
Late Sunday, police were involved in a standoff around a vehicle in Torrance, south of Los Angeles.
Aerial footage showed a white box van surrounded by armored police vehicles, while a large number of police cars were parked nearby, inside a wider police cordon.
The Los Angeles Times, citing a law enforcement source, reported that shots were fired at the scene.
Luna said that a “tactical incident” was underway.
“We believe there is a person inside that vehicle. We don’t know their condition, but we’re going to handle it the safest way we possibly can to try to identify that person.”
“Could this be our suspect? Possibly.”
The development comes as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department released photos of the man they are looking for.
Images apparently from surveillance cameras, show an Asian man wearing a beanie hat and glasses.
‘Year of the Rabbit’
Monterey Park, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, is home to about 60,000 people, most of them Asian or Asian American.
“We don’t know if this is a hate crime specifically defined by law,” Luna said, “but who goes to a dance hall and shoots 20 people?”
Although the gunman remained at large, the sheriff said it was safe for people to attend Lunar New Year events.
An AFP reporter said sheriff’s deputies remained at the scene at the Monterey park, with decorations for the Lunar New Year masked by police tape.
A banner above the road reads “Happy Year of the Rabbit”.
US President Joe Biden tweeted that he and his wife, Jill, were “praying for the people killed and injured in last night’s deadly mass shooting in Monterey Park,” adding, “I am monitoring this situation closely.” Am.”
The shooting was the deadliest in the US since a shooter killed 22 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last May.
Wong Wei, a Monterey Park resident, told the Los Angeles Times that his friend was in the dance club’s bathroom when the shooting happened.
When she came out, she saw a man carrying a long gun and firing indiscriminately. The bodies of two women and a man were lying on the floor.
The newspaper reported that Seung Won Choi, who owns a nearby restaurant, said three men had entered the establishment and asked them to lock the door.
The three told Choi that there was a man with a semi-automatic gun that had several rounds of ammunition and was reloaded repeatedly.
Tens of thousands of people had gathered earlier for the two-day Lunar New Year festival, one of the largest in the region. Events scheduled for Sunday were canceled following the attack.
“My heart breaks for the victims, their families, and the people of my hometown,” Rep. Judy Chu, the former mayor of Monterey Park, said on Twitter.
Chu was on the scene, joining the festivities hours before the shooting, when the crowd was still large. “It could have been so much worse,” she said.
hate crime?
Authorities said detectives were reviewing surveillance video and did not yet know whether the suspect was targeting any specific groups.
The US Department of Justice said that there will be more than 7,000 hate crimes reported in the United States in 2021, two-thirds of which are related to race.
Gun violence is a major problem in the United States, with 647 mass shootings last year killing at least four people, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.
In addition to the California shooting, 12 more people were injured in an overnight shooting at a nightclub in Louisiana, local media reported.
More than 44,000 people are expected to die from gunshot wounds in 2022 across the United States, more than half of which are suicides.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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