(MENAFN- Gulf Times) Police in western Canada were investigating yesterday the "senseless mass murder" of six adults and two children, who were apparently slain by a depressed man who later killed himself.
Police chief Rod Knecht said killings-the worst ever in Edmonton-were "planned and deliberate" and apparently were carried out during a domestic dispute.
The killings began late Monday in the southern part of Edmonton, a city of nearly 1mn people in Alberta province, where a man shot to death a woman in her 30s, Knecht said.
The man then headed to a residence in the north of the city, where he killed another seven people-three women, two men, a girl and a boy.
Alerted by reports of a disturbance, police went Monday initially to a home in Edmonton where they discovered the body of the first female victim.
They went later that evening to investigate reports of a "suicidal male" at a house in the north of the city.
An initial visit to the house showed nothing that appeared out of the ordinary, but when police returned a few hours later and entered the home, they discovered the bodies of the seven murder victims.
The body of the suspected killer, an apparent suicide, was found early Tuesday in a Vietnamese restaurant in Fort Saskatchewan, a northeastern suburb of Edmonton.
Authorities indicated that the suspect "had a business interest" in the restaurant where his body was found.
The names and ages of the victims and their killer were not immediately released.
Knecht said the suspect had a criminal record dating back to 1987 of sexual assault and violence, and was in deep financial distress.
A woman told the Edmonton Journal newspaper that she had heard noises Monday outside the restaurant.
She looked and saw several police officers, one of whom yelled through a megaphone for someone in the restaurant to "come out with your hands up!".
Detectives went on to find a dead man inside and quickly identified him as the suspected killer. Knecht stressed that the public was not at any risk.
"This series of events are not believed to be random acts," he said at a news conference.
"And these events do not appear to be gang-related, but rather tragic incidents of domestic violence."
The police chief added that "our thoughts go out to the community... with this senseless mass murder."
The killings were the worst ever in Edmonton, where six people were slain in a tragic incident in 1956.
Mass killings and gun crime are relatively rare in Canada compared to the neighbouring United States, where gun ownership is also much more widespread.
The suspected killer of eight people in the Canadian city Edmonton had a criminal record dating back to 1987 and used a stolen handgun to carry out the murders before killing himself, police said.
Authorities disclosed the name of the first victim, Cyndi Duong, 37, but said no other identities would be made public until autopsies were carried out on New Year's Day. The dead include two children.
Police chief Rod Knecht characterised the murders as premeditated domestic violence and said there was no apparent link to drugs or gang activity.
"This is a horrific event for the city and in my 39 years of policing I've never seen anything like it," he told a news conference late on Tuesday.
Local media quoted neighbours as saying the man had a history of being confrontational. Canadian police said the weapon, a 9mm pistol, was legally registered in British Columbia in 1987 and stolen in 2006.
Mass killings are rare in Edmonton, a city of 878,000 people which had 27 homicides in 2013. Police said yesterday the eight murders and one suicide made the mass killing the deadliest in the history of the city incorporated in 1904.
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