<div style="text-align: justify; "><b style="font-size: 1rem;">The gunman believed to have killed 10 people during Lunar New Year celebrations in California shot himself dead as police moved in to arrest him, the local sheriff said Sunday.</b><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">An intensive manhunt began late Saturday after a man opened fire inside a dance studio and club in Monterey Park, a city near Los Angeles with a large Asian community.</div><div style="text-align: justify; "><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Witnesses said he had shot indiscriminately, and appeared to have a lot of ammunition.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Five men and five women were killed, most in their 50s or 60s, police said, with around 10 others injured.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The suspected gunman, identified by police as 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, then went to another dance venue a short distance away but was tackled and disarmed by people at the club before fleeing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said over the following hours police tracked a wanted van, which was later reported in Torrance, several miles (kilometers) south.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">When officers approached, they heard one gunshot from within.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The suspect sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was pronounced dead at the scene," Luna said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"I can confirm that there are no outstanding suspects from the mass shooting incident."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Luna said the reason behind the horrific attack, which came as Asian communities around the world celebrated Lunar New Year, the most important holiday of the calendar, remained a mystery.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"The investigation is still ongoing. Sheriff's homicide detectives are working around the clock gathering additional information and working on determining the motive behind this extremely tragic event," he said</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Luna paid tribute to two people at the site of the second attempted attack.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"I can tell you that the suspect walked in there, probably with the intent to kill more people, and two brave community members decided they were going to jump into action and disarm him."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"They took possession of the weapon, and the suspect ran away."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The weapon used was not an assault rifle, Luna said, but "a magazine-fed semi automatic assault pistol... that had an extended large capacity magazine attached to it."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">- 'Year of the rabbit' -</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Monterey Park, only a few miles from downtown Los Angeles, is home to around 60,000 people, the majority of them Asian or Asian American.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"We don't know if this is specifically a hate crime defined by law," Luna said earlier, "but who walks into a dance hall and guns down 20 people?"</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Sheriff's deputies in Monterey Park remained at the scene Sunday, an AFP reporter said, with decorations erected for the Lunar New Year hanging incongruously by the police tape.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A banner above the street read "Happy Year of the Rabbit."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Los Angeles Times reported that Seung Won Choi, who owns a nearby restaurant, said three people had run into the establishment and told him to lock the door.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The three told Choi there was a man with a semiautomatic gun who had multiple rounds of ammunition and repeatedly reloaded.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Tens of thousands of people had gathered earlier for the two-day Lunar New Year festival, one of the area's largest. Events planned for Sunday were canceled after the attack.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"My heart is broken for the victims, their families, and the people of my hometown," Representative Judy Chu, a former mayor of Monterey Park, said on Twitter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Chu had been at the scene, joining the festivities hours before the shooting, when the crowd was still large. "This could have been so much worse," she said.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">President Joe Biden later Sunday evening ordered all US flags to be lowered to half-staff until Thursday in honor of the victims.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"While there is still much we don't know about the motive in this senseless attack, we do know that many families are grieving tonight, or praying that their loved one will recover from their wounds," Biden said in a statement.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At a community support center in Monterey Park, Joe Avalos of the Los Angeles Crisis Response Team said people were shaken and trying to piece together what had happened.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">"We have one or two families here that have not been able to get in touch with their loved ones and they don't know if they're in the hospital or they're dead," he told AFP.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">- Hate crime? -</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Last year a Chinese-American gunman attacked a Taiwanese church in California, killing one and wounding five others.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The US Department of Justice said there were over 7,000 reported hate crimes in the United States in 2021, two-thirds of them race-related.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Monterey Park shooting is the country's deadliest since a gunman in Uvalde, Texas killed 22 people at an elementary school last May.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Gun violence is a huge problem in the United States, which last year saw 647 mass shootings, with at least four people shot or killed by a shooter, according to the Gun Violence Archive website.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That was further driven home when 12 people were injured in a shooting at a nightclub overnight in Louisiana, local media reported.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">More than 44,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2022 across the United States, more than half of which were suicides. AP/UNB</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>