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Several people killed in Switzerland shooting Swiss factory shooting leaves several dead
(35 minutes later)
Several people have been killed and seriously injured during a shooting at a factory near the Swiss city of Lucerne, police said on Wednesday. A shooting at a wood-processing company in central Switzerland has left three people dead and seven wounded, some of them seriously, prosecutors say.
Swiss police said in a brief statement that several people had been killed and injured at a shooting at around 9am (0800 GMT) at a wood processing company called Kronospan in the town of Menznau. The shooting occurred shortly after 9am on Wednesday at the premises of Kronospan, a company in the small town of Menznau, west of Lucerne.
Police said the emergency services were on the scene and the area had been largely cordoned off, but gave no further details, saying only that they would give further updates later in the day. Three people were killed, among them the suspected assailant, police in Lucerne said in a statement. A further seven were wounded, several of them seriously. Officials gave no further details.
The Swiss news agency SDA quoted the rescue helicopter service as saying it had flown four seriously injured people to hospital. The local Neue Luzerner Zeitung newspaper cited a witness as saying that the shooter opened fire in the company canteen. It was not immediately clear who the shooter was, what the motive might have been or whether the assailant worked for the company.
Last month, a gunman killed three women and wounded two men in the Swiss village of Daillon, stirring a debate about Switzerland's firearms laws that allow its male citizens to retain guns after their mandatory military service. According to the local town council, Kronospan has some 450 employees.
There is no national gun register but some estimates indicate that at least one in every three of Switzerland's 8 million inhabitants keeps a gun, many stored at home. Citizens outside the military can apply for a permit to purchase up to three weapons from the age of 18 in a country where shooting and hunting are popular sports. "At the moment we're all in a state of shock," Urs Fluder, a manager at Kronospan, told Radio Pilatus, a local station. "We will see that the families are properly informed."
A shooting in the regional parliament of Zug in 2001 that caused 14 deaths prompted calls to tighten laws, but the majority of Swiss citizens rejected a proposal in 2011 for additional measures such as the creation of local arsenals for military weapons outside service periods. Gun ownership is widespread in Switzerland, thanks to liberal regulation, the failure of a 2012 referendum to tighten controls and a long-standing tradition for men to keep their military rifles after completing compulsory military service.
An estimated 2.3m firearms are owned by the country's 8 million people.
But gun crime is relatively rare, with just 24 gun killings in 2009, a rate of about 0.3 per 100,000 inhabitants. The US rate that year was about 11 times higher.
Still, there have been several high-profile incidents over the years, including the killing of 14 people at a city council meeting in Zug, not far from Lucerne, in 2001.
Last month a 33-year-old man killed three women and wounded two men in a southern Swiss village.