Hawaii gunman arrested after seven men shot dead

A gunman burst into a Xerox Corporation office building in Honolulu yesterday and killed seven employees, before escaping in …

A gunman burst into a Xerox Corporation office building in Honolulu yesterday and killed seven employees, before escaping in a company van that police cornered in a nature park hours later, police said.

After a tense stand-off, the gunman was arrested.

"He fired shots, killed seven, apparently all male. There are no reports of additional injuries," police spokeswoman, Ms Michelle Yu, said.

The shooting occurred at around 8:10 a.m. (1810 GMT), police said, when the gunman walked into a conference room of the firm where he had been an employee and started shooting.

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He then fled the scene is a green company van, until police managed to track him down and surround his vehicle shortly before 11:00 a.m. (2100 GMT) about two miles outside of Honolulu.

Before the arrest, the city's mayor, Mr Jeremy Harris, told CNN television that "the situation is under control". He said the man had apparently suffered "some sort of mental breakdown."

Police had surrounded the suspect's vehicle near a park known for its hiking trails in the Tantalus neighbourhood and were trying to negotiate his surrender. Local news reports identified the man as Bryan Uyesugi, a 40-year-old Asian-American. Mayor Harris told CNN that the gunman was apparently an employee who had been recently fired or who was about to be fired.

Mr Richard Soo of the Honolulu fire department told the network that the victims "are all workers of Xerox," adding that the suspected gunman "has 17 weapons registered to him."

He said the gunman had used a 9 mm pistol in the shooting. It was not known how many other weapons he had been carrying.

Xerox said in a statement that it had evacuated its office in Honolulu and was co-operating with the police investigation.

"Our foremost concern is for the safety and security of our employees and for the comfort of the families of the victims," the statement said.

Mayor Harris said the shooting came as a shock to residents of the city, which he said is the 11th-largest in the United States but the safest of all major US cities.

The shooting is the latest in a series of mass murders across the United States since April.

In one of the worst cases, seven people were killed in September during a church service in Fort Worth, Texas, by Larry Ashbrook who then took his own life.

In 1996, some 34,000 people died in the United States from gunshot wounds, including suicides, accidental deaths and homicides.

There are 200 million firearms in the country.