Five people have been killed, including a 10-year-old girl, in a rare mass shooting in the United Kingdom.
The deadly incident occurred after a gunman opened fire on a house in the city of Plymouth in southwest England.
A shooter was also found dead in the scene.
“A further male, believed to be the offender was also deceased at the scene. All are believed to have died from gunshot wounds,” the police statement said.
The police described the attack as a “serious firearms incident”.
The Devon and Cornwall Police said they were called to Keyham, a district of Plymouth, at 6:10 p.m. and found six people dead from gunshots including the gunman.
There were both male and female victims, the police said.
However, the authorities did not offer a motive but said the shooting was “not a terrorism-related incident.”
Eyewitness Testimony
Sharron Turner who lives behind the scene of the shooting, told The Times newspaper that a gunman had “kicked in” the front door of a semidetached house.
He then started shooting a young mother and her daughter, who was aged about five.
Turner, 57, said she had been told that the man, who was dressed in black and grey, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon.
The gunman then escaped through a park behind the house.
“We heard a number of loud bangs which I said sounded like gunshots,” the paper quoted Turner as saying. “Then he ran into the park and there were further shots.”
Rare Shooting
The kind of mass shooting seen hundreds of times each year in the United States rarely happens in Britain, making the incident on Thursday a grim outlier.
The last one was in 2010, when a taxi driver killed 12 people and wounded 25 others in the Lake District, a tourist destination in northwestern England.
Since then, the UK has imposed strict rules on gun ownership, making it one of the lowest rates for gun killings in the world.
