By Ulysse BELLIER
Four people were killed and at least six wounded on Monday when a man opened fire at a bank in Louisville, the main city of Kentucky, in the midwestern United States, before being killed, local authorities said.
“Five people have died in total. At least six more people have been transported” to the hospital, Louisville police reported on Twitter, including the shooter in the death toll.
“At this time we do not know what state they are in” the hospitalized people, said Paul Humphrey, a city police officer, at a press conference.
The “lonely” gunman has died, police said, after indicating that he had been “neutralized”.
“The population is no longer in danger,” he said.
“This is what we know so far: some calls reported an attacker in action around 8:30 this morning” (12:30 GMT) in a downtown bank and “the agents arrived at the scene in a few minutes,” he adds in the social network.
Some survivors took refuge in the vault, a CNN reporter reported.
Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced he was heading immediately to the scene.
– Banco –
A witness told local channel WHAS11 that he saw a man with an “assault rifle” shooting at a bank.
Another witness, named Debbie, told local channel WDRB that she saw a victim on the ground in front of a hotel when she stopped at a red light while driving.
Then there were shots. “I’m out,” she said. “When I turned around, I saw that one of the windows in the bank was broken.”
There was a large police deployment, he describes. “They came from everywhere. The policemen were coming out of the cars with assault rifles.
– An ordinary drama –
On March 27, a person opened fire at a private elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee (south). He killed three 9-year-old boys and three employees before being shot dead by police.
The United States pays a heavy price for the spread of firearms on its soil and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants: one in three adults owns at least one weapon and almost one in two lives in a house where there is a weapon.
As a consequence of this proliferation, the country registers a very high rate of death by firearm, incomparable with that of other developed States.
Some 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2021, up from 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.
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© Agence France-Presse